Our art is the struggle of memory against forgetting
‘We, the people of South Africa’ should not accept it when the government says it cannot afford to protect or promote our culture and heritage
O n Thursday South Africa commemorated Heritage day. Our rich heritage is a cause for celebration. But this year it was to be tinged with great sadness and anxiety. In the last few months we have seen deaths of ordinary people who helped define our heritage by becoming extraordinary: Andrew Mlangeni, Achmat Dangor and George Bizos. These were people whose lives contained South Africa’s raging currents, epitomised its human beauty and witnessed its contradictions and cruelty. But we have also lost many other South Africans (due to Covid-19 and other causes), less well known perhaps, but whose stories and memories, if they had been documented in their lifetime, would have deepened understanding of our conflicted soul. This made Heritage Day 2020 a time for soul searching. The Covid-19 reset has raised questions about our identity and the values and heritage that the official narrative claims we celebrate. In words given to a character in Achmat Dangor’s 2001 novel, Bitter Fruit:
“My heritage … unwanted, imposed, my history, my beginnings.”
Questions abound: As we try to recover from the devastating economic collapse, what values will we advance? Where will we find our spiritual reserves when our financial reserves are depleted? What is our heritage? What strength do we draw from it? What meanings should we ascribe to it? According to the Collins Dictionary: “A
country’s heritage is all the qualities, traditions, or features of life there that have continued over many years and have been passed on from one generation to another.” Because of our history, the many ethnicities and nationalities that got mixed into the South African melting pot, heritage may still mean different things to many different people: we have many strands to our identity, there is an isiZulu heritage, an Afrikaner heritage, an indigenous heritage, even a colonial heritage, to name but a few.
Diversity is a strength, not a dilution. But our heritage is also the unbroken thread that runs from 1652 through until today, of the public and private struggles of peoples for freedom and dignity and all that they have spawned in our literature, art, music and history. However, what started with conquest culminated in 1996 in a Constitution that was both a convergence of the many strands of our heritage and a document that sought to launch us into a new era that, according to its preamble, would allow “we, the people of South Africa” to “heal the divisions of the past” and “free the potential of each person”. Paradoxically, one part of our heritage would be the unmaking of another part of our heritage. This is what campaigns by young activists like those of #RhodesMustFall and #BlackLivesMatter have sought to do: not to obliterate history or heritage, but to reorder it so as to “free the potential of each person”.
Democracy is vital to making heritage meaningful and inclusive. To this end, the Constitution’s Bill of Rights, democracy’s “cornerstone”, seeks to protect our heritage, in part by protecting rights to “language and culture” but in a manner that is inclusive and expansive rather than exclusive and triumphal. It also seeks to protect our wonderful natural environment, tied in so many ways to our heritage, from pollution and ecological degradation “for the benefit of present and future generations”.
It may feel far-fetched, even romantic, to think of a constitution that only became law in 1996 as a vital part and protector of South Africa’s heritage. But as much as we celebrate our heritage we must galvanise ourselves for another fight. Heritage is political. Heritage cannot be taken for granted. Traces of it can be lost, hidden, manipulated or deliberately destroyed. When that happens we lose our memory and identity. This is why people should know and be concerned to hear that museums like Liliesleaf and District Six are threatened with closure due to lack of funds; of the neglect of Robben Island Museum; of the financial difficulties faced by the historic Lovedale Press, or the possible closure of a 30-yearold non-profit organisation, the South African History Archive (SAHA) due to donor disinterest; and of the disrepair and lack of protection of our national and provincial archives. It’s a disaster. For these reasons “We, the people of South Africa” should be angered by a government and political leaders who co-opt and appropriate our heritage once a year for political reasons, use it to decorate their houses or doeks,
We, the People of South Africa should protest that the Ministry of Sports, Arts and Culture, is treated as a backwater, where failed or implicated politicians who usually don’t give a shit about arts or culture, are parked out of harm’s way – but then cause harm to an even more vulnerable ecosystem.
but generally deny it to the people. “We, the People of South Africa” should protest that the Ministry of Sports, Arts, and Culture is treated as a backwater, where failed or implicated politicians who usually don’t give a shit about arts or culture are parked out of harm’s way – but then cause harm to an even more vulnerable ecosystem.
“We, the people of South Africa” should not accept it when our government says it cannot afford to protect or promote our heritage. Why is it we can still “afford” blue lights for lousy politicians, expenditure of hundreds of millions on pointless conferences and workshops, MPs’ perks, plane rides and cars – but cannot afford to maintain our mueseums. As we consider economic and psychological recovery from the trauma of Covid-19 and the inequality it has laid bare, our museums and heritage sites have the potential to be sources of wealth creation and local economic opportunity. We should demand that they are part of the economic recovery plan, not throttled by austerity. On Heritage Day 2020, memory has never been more important and forgetting more dangerous. DM168