As has happened every year since 1994, South Africa will be celebrating Heritage Day on 24 September – most likely in the dark. Like every other day of the year, this day is a difficult one for far too many South Africans who continue to pay the heavy price exacted by our past, especially as a result of race-based forced removals and unequal education.

Promulgated in 1950, the Group Areas Act scripted the inevitability of what was to come for South Africa’s black communities. In most instances, the consequences of the act were felt for generations after its implementation by those who were forcibly removed from their homes.

Dispossession affected not only where people lived, but what they earned, the kind of education their children received, the severing of community bonds, the breakdown of families, effects on health, as well as prospects for their participation in the labour market.

What does it mean to be trapped in a dysfunctional, dangerous, dense neighbourhood, stripped of your property, your dignity, your ticket to better opportunities? How is this understood on Heritage Day?

According to the Gini index (the most widely used measure of inequality), South Africa is the most unequal country in the world. This pattern has remained more or less unchanged in the quarter-century of political freedoms we have enjoyed.

A society cannot maintain this level of unequal opportunity and claim to be free or find much to celebrate. A fair distribution of income is both a moral imperative and crucial to a socially cohesive society. What are the ways to think about heritage, freedom and justice when political freedom without equality falls short of the promise made to us in 1994?

A Gini coefficient of 0.7 has many human faces embedded in histories and heritage. The broad outlines of these that formed the basis of apartheid land and labour market policies are known: forced removals, separate development, the migrant labour system, and attendant policies that governed both place and opportunity.

What do we learn when we look at what was deprived or lost to the greater majority of the population? Do the lessons deepen our understanding of why, despite political freedoms, it is hard to move the needle on inequality in our country?

Heritage Day compels us to think about how we have come to be. It also urges us to think about loss in all its forms, including the hopes, dreams and opportunities forever denied by being evicted to inhospitable spaces as a result of the colour of one’s skin.

This holiday offers the space for the telling of untold stories that reveal the true price of our bigoted past. It asks us to think about what it means to have been dispossessed to a far-flung township with unfamiliar and inferior schools. The day is an opportunity to examine what it meant, and continues to mean, to receive an education as a black child in this country.

The connection between the historical accident of geographic proximity and access to better opportunities for work, worship, community and education, means that from its very inception, apartheid-era spatial planning worked hand-in-hand with a plethora of legislation and policy shifts that dramatically altered the life chances of a generation of young people.

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Today this injustice persists: the current funding model of public schooling in South Africa means that unless you live in areas that are not regarded as a “township”, you won’t get access to the calibre of schools that tend to dominate matric performances year in and year out.

Even if families somehow manage to get their children admitted to former Model C schools, it doesn’t mean that they can afford the fees. In line with the proliferation of gated communities and boomed-off suburbs, the privileged in South Africa bunkered down. Education was no different. The kind of education you receive cannot be separated from where you live, and this dual injustice has had a profound impact on opportunities, mobility and inequality.

In short, a place in contemporary South Africa simultaneously strips away freedoms by being a generator of poverty. As a result, public education has come to represent a stubborn site of inequality in contemporary South Africa.

The high level of enrolment in secondary schools in South Africa does not reflect the level of learning taking place in schools or the substantial differences in the quality of education received across schools. A child attending a school in a township or a rural village with pit toilets is not in a fair race with a child at, say, Pretoria Boys, Bishops, Rondebosch Boys, Crawford College, St Alban’s or St John’s, or any of the scores of private schools that mushroomed after 1994.

Today, with the expansion of secondary schools almost complete, results on international tests in numeracy and literacy continue to reflect the apartheid legacy of inequality in access and especially in the quality of education. Where you live will impact what education you receive and what job you will land.

Perhaps this Heritage Day we will take stock of our country, but also find hope in the remarkable contributions made by so many South Africans, including the late anti-apartheid poet and writer Gladys Thomas. It is in revisiting legacies of these sorts that offers hope.

Despite the Natives Land Act of 1913, the Population Registration Act of 1950, the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949, the Immorality Act of 1950, the Group Areas Act of 1950, the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act of 1953 and the Bantu Education Act of 1953, we are still here.

We are creative beings, each capable of magnificent things. We can have the future we each deserve if we grasp what heritage and the cost of history means to each one in our country. DM

This article draws from the inaugural address of Siona O’Connell as professor in the School of Arts at the University of Pretoria.