REFLECT ON THE RAINBOW NATION THIS HERITAGE DAY
HERITAGE Day presents us with an opportunity to celebrate our heritage, while also appreciating what our heritage has sustained, through what it has survived and how we experience it today.
Indeed, the sort of experience South Africa has gone through is one that breaks people and destroys their beliefs, traditions and cultures. Accordingly, our heritage which gives us a sense of identity should have withered. Yet it did not.
The resilience of our people born out of unity saw them survive the onslaught of sustained racial oppression, and emerge from obscurity holding high the banner of our heritage. Through their strength to overcome, they defeated an irrational system of governance, which had divided them for many decades.
To honour this resilience of our people and their cultural heritage, the Inkatha Freedom Party in 1994 led the way in advocating for September 24 to be incorporated to the Public Holidays Bill as Heritage Day to give every South African an opportunity to celebrate diversity in cultural heritage.
We understood that regardless of whoever is governing the country in the future, it would be important to ensure that South African citizens wanting to belong to this nation do so with the firm knowledge that their culture, whether it be African, so-called coloured, British, Afrikaner or Indian is welcomed and appreciated here.
But as we prepare to dig deep into our wardrobes and fish out our traditional attires to celebrate our unity in diversity, we are confronted by the fact that our country has become more divided, as it becomes apparent that ours was an incomplete liberation.
Our country is marked by social and economic imbalances, aggravated by high levels of criminality, unemployment, the weakening rand and the arduous struggle against racism and bigotry. Put bluntly, the Rainbow Nation for all its beautiful colours no longer symbolises a beacon of hope after the travesties of apartheid or a brighter future for all South Africans.
Sadly, most of our current problems are an inheritance of our past, which will persist for as long as we actively renounce the challenge to solve them. And they will not disappear for as long as we continue to hold grudges and perceive each other as enemies, rather than uniting around a clear identification of the real enemies of mankind – poverty, unemployment and inequality.
In celebrating this day, it remains imperative that we use our cultural diversity to unify people and encourage them to work collectively in correcting the wrongs of the present. This is essentially because culture, as Paulo Coelho notes, “makes people understand each other better. And if they understand each other better… It is easier (for them) to overcome their economic and political barriers.
First, they must understand that their neighbour is, in the end, just like them, with the same problems…” With so much cultural diversity in our country, it is hard to imagine why we have failed to fully overcome the economic and political barriers. Bonginkosi Dhlamini, MPL,
and IFP Gauteng chairperson