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Heritage Day is a very special holiday day in our beautiful country.
On this day, we celebrate our common humanity, with its rich tapestry of diverse and colourful cultures. We celebrate the many languages spoken in our country, the variety of religious beliefs and the freedom we enjoy to openly express our feelings and loves in different and beautiful ways.
Essentially, we are embracing and celebrating our magnificent diversity, which we recognise as our strength despite the persistent challenges of poverty, unemployment and inequality. If we, as a nation, can be truly united in our diversity, that strength will become a powerful force.
Quite simply, it means giving effect to our unique motto:
Diversity we surely have in splendid abundance, but for it to become a strength we need to all contribute to ensuring that there is enough for everyone. We need to shed our prejudices and stop believing that our differences make us superior or inferior to one another.
As Maya Angelou put it:
On September 24 we celebrate every precious thread of this tapestry. Days of celebration are important. We have emerged – not by luck, but through sacrifice and struggle – from a difficult past and we surely owe it to ourselves to celebrate who we are, our many different identities, the beautiful land we have inherited and the many joyful things we do together.
Every single South African has a heritage to cherish and has moments of joy and celebration, whether it is the birth of a child, a love found or a marriage, or an achievement that we feel proud of. Our joy is expressed in song and dance, in laughter and in poetry, in the colourful clothes we wear on special occasions ... This is how it should be.
But this is where we need to pause and reflect:
Sadly, the answer is no for so many who live in daily realities that prevent them from celebrating. For the many children and women who will be abused in their homes there will be little to celebrate. It will be another day of anguish for the parents who are unable to put enough food on the table for their children. The homeless who will be sleeping outside tonight will not celebrate this day.
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This Heritage Day follows a particularly difficult period in the history of our country. Our dream was for our democracy to put us on a steady uphill path, perhaps rocky at times, with some unavoidable setbacks, but overall a steady march towards the society we set out to create. It is tragic that greed, selfishness and abuse of power in both the public and private sector set us back from the realisation of that dream.
Let us therefore use Heritage Day to reflect deeply on the scourge of state capture and corruption. Its extent and layers, carefully hidden by its perpetrators, have been uncovered by the Zondo commission and the new leadership at critical institutions such as the SA Revenue Service, the National Prosecuting Authority, the Special Investigating Unit and the Hawks.
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Often leads were provided by courageous men and women who took a strong stance as whistle-blowers. Where vestiges of corruption remain or wherever it raises its ugly head afresh, let us forge a culture of absolute zero tolerance.
The underlying message is clear:
Just as we were trying to navigate our way out of state capture, the Covid-19 pandemic struck. It exacerbated the poverty, unemployment and inequalities that were already painfully with us. And while there are many heart-warming stories of caring and kindness in the midst of this awful pandemic, representing the absolute best of us, some of the worst came out as well, as we witnessed some of the most despicable corruption imaginable.
Now, more than ever before, we need to be united in our fight against the evils that plague us. And the only way we can succeed is to be united in our diversity and united in our quest to create a better life for everyone in our country.
So while there really is so much to celebrate, our celebration is dampened in the face of brutal poverty and continued violence against women and children that makes life unbearable for many women in our country.
READ: ‘Male role models needed to dismantle patriarchy in the workplace’
We dream of a non-racial, non-sexist society in which there will be no more hunger, homelessness and abuse of women, but our dream will never be realised for as long as corruption erodes all the gains we have made and takes away the resources that are sorely needed to address the many challenges we face.
On this Heritage Day we need to genuinely embrace our diversity and focus more on our common aspirations and desires than on our differences (which are often quite superficial), and work together to make South Africa a country that belongs to all who live in it; a South Africa that cares and where individual voices and diversity become a huge source of joy, pride and strength.
READ: Heritage Month | Celebrating amaZulu customs
It is up to us to forge the new legacy, to build on the struggles of our forebears. Heritage Day must be a day that will be celebrated by all. On this day we should be able to say that we got through the hard times by accepting and respecting each other with all our differences and uniqueness, and working together towards a common goal.
Let us be open-minded to creating the type of heritage that the coming generation will reflect on and be proud of. Let us be open to discarding of corruption, lawlessness, violence and intolerance such as xenophobia, which seem to overshadow our potential as a people.
READ: Robben Island Museum’s management accused of corruption and neglect
Let us reimagine a South Africa that cares.
I am reminded of the words of lifelong activist Ahmed Kathrada, who once said that the hardest thing to open is a closed mind.
Hanekom is chairperson of the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation
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