Heritage Month a time to reflect on social cohesion
Past lessons not forgotten
Our languages, the shieldbearing warriors, fashioned beadwork, stick fighting, vibrant and beautiful geometric designs, brightly coloured blankets, mopane worms, the Sangoma, the Christian, Hindu or Muslim, the vibrant mythical belief system, the Dutch, the British and German settler each bring their flavour to the mix of SA’s heritage.
Our living heritage is the narration of our stories — oral history through song, dance and today, also the written word, passed from generation to generation, about who we are, where we come from and where we should be going.
Africans should be proud of our traditions and of who we are so we occupy our pride of place as equals with all the people of the world.
We emerge from a terrible past that ridiculed and sought to destroy our customs, traditions and religions. Our democracy still displays the traits of our divided past and debates about our future quite often coalesce along racial lines that seek to negate social cohesion, reconciliation and human solidarity.
Let this Heritage Month be a season in which we revisit and reflect on the common idea that made millions of South Africans register to vote for a democratic, peaceful, and constitutional democracy.
Instead of social cohesion and nation building, our citizens have absorbed the value system of the capitalist market which corrodes relations of kinship, neighbourhood, profession and creed.
Therefore, government, religious organisations, civil society, business and labour should make the project of nation building, social cohesion and human solidarity a national priority.
Our constitution of 1996, which is an extraordinary product of African hands and African minds, correctly stipulates our common purpose as a people, and that is to build a united and democratic SA. For this to materialise, its people, both black and white, must take decisive strides to break down the racial walls that still distinguish us.
SA cannot construct a truly non-racial, non-sexist society if we continue with the divisions of the past. We must strengthen and consolidate social cohesion, reconciliation and solidarity.
If we don’t, we will have fallen short of Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s exhortation to be generous, hospitable, friendly, caring and compassionate. We will have condemned the project of creating a united, nonracial and non-sexist society if we do not understand that we are what we are because of our fellow South Africans.
Failure to do so will be to openly denounce the glorious achievement of which the first black democratic president, Nelson Mandela, said the sun shall never set.
We should resist reenacting the deeds of our horrible past, thereby insulting the sacrifices of our forebears. This Heritage Month, we should place at the centre of our daily activities the goals of social cohesion and human solidarity. A nation still gripped by racial, and ethnic tensions is a tinderbox.
It behoves a people not to bury a society born of struggle and fortitude into a theatre of anger and resentment. Nation building, social cohesion and human solidarity are our common heritage. The hour has come for ubuntu.