Commemoration of Heritage Day
Comes at a precarious time in our country’s history
Heritage Day, which falls on September 24 each year, is a day meant to acknowledge and celebrate the racial and cultural diversity of South Africa.
This year marks the return of the first full-swing Heritage Day celebrations in two years, since Covid-19 has had us indoors or in masks. It will be a day where people come to work or school dressed in their cultural attire, and possibly attend speeches or presentations about different cultures.
The comeback of Heritage Day celebrations is welcome, but it also forces us to acknowledge the intervening two years where conspicuous chasms between different cultural groups have resulted in unimaginable calamity. To be specific, 2020-2021 witnessed frequent xenophobia and unrest, leading to violence and widespread hate speech. Thus, this year’s Heritage Day is more poignant than any other time in recent memory.
According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), in a report on discrimination in South Africa, South Africa has regular occurrences of violent and/or verbal discrimination. In addition to raising the alarm about the frequency of xenophobic attacks in South Africa, the report added that there has not been enough prevention and intervention from the government.
Then, there is the case of the July unrest last year. Given that the events that unfolded last year are still painfully fresh in our memory, there is no need to rehash them here. But, what must be known, and repeated is that 35 people were killed when Black and Indian communities clashed last year.
Somewhere, somehow we missed the mark.
In an attempt to find out more about why Heritage Day holds such importance for our democracy, I spoke to a professor of sociology and religion at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), Federico Settler.
“Heritage Day is important because it gives communities across the country the opportunity to think about what matters culturally, and what holds us together as a nation, or as a local community,” he said.
“Our history of exclusion and trauma, and current fears of poverty causes us to draw hard lines between who and what matters, and who and what does not - and it becomes easy to blame those who are different from you through culture, religion, wealth and citizenship.
“Heritage Day is a reminder that we are diverse, and it is a chance to appreciate those who are different from us. We spend far too much time marking out our cultural boundaries and walls, and not enough time learning about those people whose cultures, religions, and languages are different from our own,” he added.
Settler acknowledged the past two years, where discrimination became ubiquitous, saying that “plurality is not easy”, but “actively working, arguing and wrestling with [issues of inclusion and exclusion] is an indication of a society that is trying to tolerate difference, and be inclusive.”
This Heritage Day, Settler encourages the public to use heritage day to do more than “light fires for a braai” and “eat shinyama.” Instead, he suggests, we use the day to acknowledge the multiple heritages in South Africa, and “appreciate different experiences of the past, and think about how that past impacts the present.”
Hopefully, through the use of days like Heritage Day, we can acknowledge and appreciate the cultural diversity in our country and, one day, we will venerate, instead of villainise people different from ourselves.