Search for a common heritage

Among the far-sightedness of our constitution is its acknowledgement of our common and diverse heritage as a nation. From this stroke of genius arose Heritage Day, a national holiday to mark and celebrate our heritage, thus providing space to manifest a uniquely South African mosaic which serves as yet another platform for the promotion of national unity.

For a country with as chequered a past as South Africa, the promotion of our diverse heritage forms part of dismantling the colonial and apartheid social engineering project of “otherisation”.

In the place of dehumanisation and division, diversity’s organising principle is the humanisation and interconnectedness of people in commonly shared immediate and far away spaces. Whereas diversity is not meant to child-proof life, it eschews the lower depths of bigoted vulgarity even when it takes conflictual turns.

Those who have followed nation formation and nation building exercises in recent history appreciate that failure to manage diversity of all kinds features highly among factors that have taken many a noble post-colonial experiments out of voyage; ending up as immobile ventures whose impotence sooner or later results in fatalities akin to those of spectacular and dramatic wreckages.

Specifically with respect to our cultural heritage, it is worth our while to continue to think about how its different elements can be fused to promote nationhood, appreciating that all heritages are reflections of a society’s struggles for forms of social organisation.

In this context, the different national cultural forms of expression are best seen not as fixtures frozen in time, but as dynamic and evolving ways of interpreting and interacting with an ever changing world. The fact that all our national groups have evolved different genres which, from time immemorial, served to educate, entertain and critically reflect on society, must underscore a common human and African cultural and spiritual presence.

And so we must give consideration to the promotion of wide ranging intersectional opportunities for the cross pollination of cultural content – which often comes with unique styles of expression and delivery – of the Johnny Clegg-Savuka type, which facilitate everyday national interaction and reflection among South Africans; beyond the stage performances that official Heritage Day functions affords to different expressions of our heritage.

Imagine sustained multi-lingual post-apartheid cultural and intellectual outputs that place on the discourse agenda wide-ranging concerns such as poverty, inequality and unemployment, domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse, the successes and pitfalls of the evolution of our democracy and much more.

Speaking of language, a controversy-laden area that is regularly canvassed in the public domain is the place and role of language in the affirmation of specific national groups. The debate is important for a variety of reasons.

As repositories of constructing and deconstructing the world around us, languages are crucial to their speakers’ self-definition and externalisation in the sense of capacity to contribute to society.

Seen in this context, the development of any language contributes to national collective advancement in that it unlocks and makes its wisdom available to a wider audience.

Fortunately, there is no dispute about this line of argument in South Africa, at least in important circles. The challenge remains one of doing and addressing the implications that attach to what needs to be done.

In this regard, three interrelated questions are worth pondering over. The first is whether relatively undeveloped languages such as the non-Bantu Nama and the majority of African languages can be developed without major but creative approaches to language school policy and deliberate funding, in particular of writers, community media and the national broadcaster?

Think of the Nama languages and Selobedu. They are not part of the 11 officially recognised languages. It is unlikely that these minority languages can reach sufficient levels of development and prominence for the benefit of their speakers and the nation as a whole if government – and it will have to be government in our context – does not conceive a special development programme. And, in the context of creative language policy approaches, does the fact that the Nama languages and Selobedu are not designated as official languages prevent the Western Cape and Limpopo Provincial governments from implementing measures for their development? One is, of course, not advocating the bantustanisation of otherwise national languages which, like others, are part of our national heritage.

The third question is what we do to promote multilingualism as an ideal that South Africans should aspire to beyond what the schooling system offers? On average, there is hardly any province which is monolingual. Should the average South African therefore not speak between three to four languages at least? How does each one of us transition from theoretically appreciating the value of multilingualism to practical action?

And then there is the more contentious issue of equitable access to and distribution of national wealth as a common national heritage.

Our sense of nationhood and what we will bequeath as a heritage to future generations cannot be separated from what we do at present to write a different history.

The urgency of addressing access to land and ownership patterns has, in recent years, become unavoidable. But as one has argued elsewhere before, land alone will never be society’s only socio-economic challenge even at the best of times. It is therefore vital that the land debate is premised on a larger programmatic response to the country’s overall socio-economic challenges to resolve poverty, inequality and unemployment, the better to create a just society.

After all, the structure of the South African economy, and the global setting in which it operates, is multi-sectoral in nature – including financial, industrial, agricultural and service sectors. It is crucial that we cast our mind’s eye on all the cross-cutting areas and public policy issues required for consideration in order to secure a truly equitable share by all in the economy.

It being heritage month, it would be remiss to end this column without wishing a happy belated birthday to one of the superintendents of our national heritage, the melodious songbird and esteemed member of The Order of Ikhamanga: udadewethu Sibongile Khumalo, who turned 62 years three days ago. Her contribution to the promotion of a humane culture continues to inspire. Siyabonga MaMngoma!

Ratshitanga is a consultant, and a social and political commentator (mukoni@interlinked.co.za)

Think about how different heritage elements can be fused