Recognition is a crucial part of heritage
It is both inward and outward-looking … showing we care for each other should carry more weight than wearing traditional clothing
On the subject of heritage, which South Africa celebrates on 24 September, I am torn. On one hand, heritage essentialises our complicated being into narrow identities. I am either Mpondo or Tamil and I can only be this. The ways in which we conceive of heritage do not leave room for critiques of parts of our heritage.
But, on the other hand, nurturing heritage is important for history and grounding us in tradition. When colonialism has denigrated our cultures for so long, there is something affirming about pointing to a long line of both tangible and intangible practices inherited from past generations. These are practices we cultivate and that endure and help us to claim our place in the world.
Of course, heritage is not static and is subject to selection practices about what matters and is worth passing down to generations that follow. It signifies how we want to represent ourselves and how we want to be seen. To be understood as distinct requires difference, boundary-keeping and the existence of the other who does not belong.
Heritage is both inward- and outward-looking. This is to say, it is conscious of the self and the other.
Children generally see themselves as more similar to each other than different. When they see difference, the meanings they attach to it are often not as laden with stereotypes and discriminatory values as those of adults.
When Heritage Day comes around and their teachers tell them to come dressed in ways that illustrate their heritage, many ask their parents what their heritage is. For city people, this can cause quite a scramble because they might never have seen their parents dressed in ways that represent their heritage. This is to say, they might not have observed overt performances of heritage.
Some children’s mothers might have a different heritage than their father or other parent. Does the child have space to claim both? Do we have to follow our father’s heritage if we have his surname? Does the child bring amadumbe to school while dressed in their mother’s Tswana cultural attire?
Is your heritage always Indian, even when you are a tenth-generation South African? What is a “coloured” heritage? Must it reference Cape Town culture, even when one comes from Limpopo and has never eaten bobotie or shared any history with those in the Cape? Like other markers, such as race and culture, does heritage escape geography and intersections with other parts of who we are? How is Zulu heritage practised in sites beyond Kwazulu-natal?
To be sure, since we follow the generations that precede us, we all have heritage. But when we are asked to externalise and perform it, this can be a cause of anxiety. In diverse societies such as ours, heritage may escape capture and condensation into a single thing.
My aunt loves to wear amampondo attire. She is from emampondweni. She is light-skinned and may be read as coloured in South Africanspeak. Those who read her as coloured expect her to perform a Capecoloured identity. Only, she has no affiliation to this. She cannot speak Afrikaans. She speaks and sings Mpondo dirges.
She prays to a Christian god but when she is unwell, she also embraces traditional healing practices. In fact, she was initiated and trained as a healer. She calls on a long lineage of ancestors, both here and afar. But she creates anxiety for heritage gatekeepers and those who are unaware of Mpondo history and the porosity of identity and heritage.
The opening ceremonies of major sporting events, such as the soccer world cup and the Olympics, are also showcases for national heritage. We are latecomers to these events because we were not allowed to participate for many years.
We are accustomed to seeing German, Italian, British, Dutch, Swedish and Chinese heritage. The ways these countries package their heritage suggests consensus and homogeneity. There is consensus on the national language, dress, cultural symbols and food. Even the preponderance of African players in the
French national teams is whitewashed by a Frenchness that is insistently colour-blind, despite the horrors of its colonial history and racialised poverty.
On the other hand, anyone who knows anything about Africa is aware that heterogeneity is our most common quality. Our languages, foods, cultures and practices cannot be held by consensus. As is the case with South Africa, even national anthems come loose at the seams. A mixed masala that is flawed in its very foundation and cannot find a common rhythm.
Even as we might take pride in a state president speaking their home language, we know that it speaks to a portion of the population. Some people’s heritage is more marginal to the nation-making project. Pedi and San heritage are alive but they are traces at the edges of the nation. Is it even permissible to speak of the San as part of the nation or should we play along and pretend their extinction?
And so, we observe how, despite the vibrant colours of African national sports teams, there is almost never coherence. And because African nation states were drawn incoherently at the Berlin Conference, perhaps incoherence is the most apt representation of national heritage.
In South Africa, we resort to the flag, itself an incoherent symbol, and braais. While these feel-good gestures seek to obscure difference, they might in fact be cohering around Afrikaner heritage, gathering around the fire and eating meat.
But not so fast. For many other local cultures, gathering at the hearth to prepare food, tell stories, dance and celebrate suggests that the braai might be a unifying feature of local heritage. Like the Afrikaans language, Afrikaner culture might have adopted the braai from other indigenous groups that preceded the colonial voyagers.
So, even though the braai has got bad press as a hollowing-out and trivialisation of heritage, there might be something to be said about this practice as a locally grounded heritage. Of course, the braai should not burn out other cultural practices. The lazy trope of National Braai Day might be one such form of erasure. Perhaps we should have our braais, not only in khaki shorts but in the complex array of the symbolism of what heritage means to each of us.
The British are rallying around a national heritage that centres their consensus around royalty. This heritage is so powerful that ordinary people have queued for whole days and wept around the queen’s coffin, when they might not shed a tear for their own grandparents.
The British nation is also constituted of millions of people of the Caribbean, Indian and African diasporas. How do they rally around the crown when the course of their history and lives has been so radically altered by slavery, colonialism, deprivation and ongoing marginality? When their very presence is a blemish and offence to the British nation?
National heritage may be a powerful way of organising nationhood, but it always has its margins. Those who are obscured because their presence and histories are inconvenient to the nation and heritage-making. How do we live with this ambivalence and knowledge of the power and pain of what we recognise and unsee as heritage?
Perhaps we should always be wary of celebrating heritage. Maybe our role is that of recognition rather than celebration.
Heritage could also emphasise an ethic of care or what some term ubuntu/batho. As South Africa commemorates heritage, we would do well to go beyond dressing in clothing that draws attention to our cultural heritage. Perhaps we need to draw out and stretch heritage to expand our registers of care for each other. Not to berate people who are sick because of where they come from. To centre life before the nation. To imbue each other with value. To rage at all injustice, instead of caring selectively.
Since heritage is also about the past, now might be the time to consider how our ancestors centred care in their relations with others. This might suggest that we incorporate practices like hospital visits to the sick, cleaning up our neighbourhoods and leaning in to learn each other’s languages.
Perhaps Soweto, Johannesburg, and Soshanguve, outside Pretoria, are models of care. In these townships, residents are multilingual because understanding depends on hearing and conversing with one’s neighbours. Hearing each other does not mean surrendering one’s culture. It requires one to make room for knowing and to be in relation to the other.
In suburbia, we could start with simple things like greeting our neighbours. After more than a decade of living in the same house, I only know one of my neighbours. Perhaps this Heritage Day, even as I fear prejudiced responses, I should go and introduce myself to my neighbours.
One the other hand, anyone who knows anything about
Africa is aware that heterogeneity is our most common quality
Hugo ka Canham is an associate professor of psychology at a university in Johannesburg. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Riotous Deathscapes. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the