No heritage to celebrate

SEPTEMBER is when we witness South Africans declare how “proudly South African” they are for heritage month. This euphoria will culminate on September 24, the day specifically set aside as Heritage Day. The reality, however, is that heritage (defined in the Oxford Dictionary as something that belongs to one by reason of birth or inheritance) has so far seen most South Africans celebrate this day in a place they call home, but one they have no ownership of.

For over two decades of the democratic dispensation only our traditions, customs, rituals, monuments, artworks and clothing have been the focus of celebrations of our heritage in our different tribes and collectively as a nation.

The centrality of land to economic development and social welfare, in the African context, is undeniable. Land is used to promote economic growth and human development.

While a birthright of every African indigenous person, land has always had a communal dimension in African tradition whereby all members of the community were expected to share its resources, especially in rural areas, under some form of traditional authority. From an African point of view, traditional authority is fundamental and the leader of the community has always been viewed as an overseer (not owner) with divine authority over the land.

Land resources under the stewardship of African traditional leadership were not only for economic developmental purposes, but also had significance for cultural and traditional practices. Rituals related to rain-making, thanksgiving and prayer have always been tied to land and this is no different at the southern tip. In many South African families the umbilical cord of a newborn baby is buried in the ground; in some communities the circumcised foreskin of a young man is too.

Africans further attach the sacredness of land to the fact that our ancestors are buried there. It becomes evident therefore that to the African, land is not only a means of economic development or food source but part of our spiritual identity and far transcends any notion that land is purely a commodity to be used for economic, political and power advancement.

Expropriation of land without compensation is not devoid of economic considerations – the economic is part of the social, the political, the spiritual, the cosmological and the philosophical. In the African context, life and what it is constituted of is viewed as a totality and land is part of that totality. Africa’s children can no longer languish cut off from that which connects them to God, the universe, nature, their ancestors and humanity as a whole; they can no longer be orphans in a land they received as an inheritance from God simply because of a view that refuses to see the connectedness of land to life and livelihood beyond economic terms.

Expropriation of land is imminent and then shall our heritage be complete. – Zipho Nabe, via e-mail