Our heritage should evolve to help us negotiate our futures, not keep us in a time warp, writes Kevin Ritchie.
Tradition’s a funny old thing. It’s a key part of what we call our heritage, which we duly spent Thursday celebrating over open fires burning the hell out of meat and quaffing beers – or at least I did. Can you remember the whole row that erupted over the hijacking and commercialisation of September 24, Heritage Day as National Braai Day?
The purists were understandably up in arms at the hijacking of the old Shaka Day, but you don’t have to venture past the first block on your way into Soweto to discover that “shisa nyama”, literally ‘burn the meat’ is as authentically eKasi as braaivleis is to suburban types.
It’s also a concept that’s stuck for a couple of years, probably because it’s a helluva fun way to celebrate the myriad joys of being South African. The same can be said for 67 Minutes for Madiba, an out-and-out marketing gimmick if there ever was one.
Whatever its genesis, it has sparked an immense amount of goodwill, bringing joy and hope to many who otherwise would have neither.
Winston Churchill had a typically pungent riposte when he was accused of impugning the traditions of the Royal Navy. “Rum, sodomy and the lash,” he is reported to have snorted at an accuser. It’s not the most politically correct view of Britain’s ‘senior service’ but it was probably the most accurate.
Today, the Royal Navy is a shadow of the colossus that once ruled the waves. But then again you don’t get press-ganged into service anymore or lashed for the merest misdemeanour on board, you might not even get your daily tot of rum. I can’t vouch for the rest.
Traditions should change. Our heritage should evolve to help us negotiate our futures, not keep us in a time warp at the cost of retarding us or even, in the case of unlicensed and unscrupulous circumcision schools, maimed for life. Too often traditions are hijacked by charlatans and opportunists to propagate selfish agendas under the guise of narrow nationalist agendas that serve only to polarise public cohesion to a point of implosion.
Cape Town is a case in point. You’d think that after the battle to remove the Cecil Rhodes statue from UCT, there wouldn’t be a single statue of Rhodes in Cape Town.
You might think there would be ongoing public debates around the actual transformation of the institution, as much as the original flinging of faeces (a new and thankfully unique Cape Town protest tradition). But no, the focus has moved inland to the Open Stellenbosch campaign.
And then, lo and behold, you walk through the Company’s Gardens, an incredible green lung through the centre of the city, to come face to face with some of the most bizarre contradictions.
Complete with gambolling squirrels and dive-bombing pigeons, cheek by jowl with Parliament and the president’s official office, you’ll see (if you read the signboards) that this is a space set aside in 1652 by the Dutch East India Company, to revictual the ships that pulled in to Table Bay.
Yet the first statue you come across is Sir George Grey, after whom Grey College is named.
As you wander up towards the Orange Street end, you come straight into a gigantic statue of Rhodes. He’s pointing in a typically expansionist way towards his ‘hinterland’ except he’s pointing to the sea, South America perhaps?
Further along, there’s a delightful food garden providing food once again, 300 years later, and teaching urban horticulture.
As you exit at the top, you come straight into the Delville Wood memorial, not just a white man’s war but a war of empires fought tens of thousands of kilometres away that almost plunged this country into open rebellion.
To the right stands the architect of that British toenadering, Jan Smuts in a pose reminiscent of Rodin’s The Thinker but, literally, awash in bird shit – perhaps nature’s version of #Rhodesmustgo.
Beyond lie the Iziko National Museum, the national library and art galleries, the Old Synagogue and the Holocaust Centre.
As you turn back, sidestepping the giggling pupil Romeos and Juliets, the bergies, the tourists and the businessman having a sandwich in the sun, you’re struck by St George’s Cathedral, the place where Archbishop Desmond Tutu led a key protest march in the 80s and just off to the side there’s the old slave lodge.
And suddenly you understand. This is our heritage, not all of it, but a huge chunk mashed into one.
Everyone’s got their place, the heroes, the villains, the ogres, the freedom-fighters.
For the people in the CBD, it’s an absolute haven and it’s theirs and they’re using it, and all the statues – down to the Japanese memorial – are merely a backdrop.
Maybe it’s the best sense of our their place in heritage yet. Let it free us to be who we must be; a place where diverse people unite, not a place pigeon-holing us by the past irrespective of whether we were party to it or not.
*Ritchie is the editor of The Star
Saturday Star