On 16 December we celebrated Reconciliation Day in South Africa, a public holiday. Like many other public holidays, it is defined by a persistent, utter meaninglessness that applies to just about every other historical public holiday.
This year it has been particularly peculiar because 15 December was declared a public holiday in recognition of the Springboks winning their second Rugby World Cup in a row, and the fourth overall. As expected, nothing of any meaning was done or said to mark the day. It was just a day off ahead of the upcoming holiday season.
Of course, I accept that I may be mistaken and that millions of South Africans spent at least a few moments reflecting on the meaning of the day, but I doubt it. Like Human Rights Day and Youth Day, both days of massive historical significance, their meaninglessness is often punctuated by tepid political speeches that have little or no meaning.
Depending on which side of the divide you were on, 16 December was either Day of the Vow (Dingaan’s Day if you were an Afrikaner nationalist) or MK Day as the ANC’s military wing was founded on this day. In a quest to bridge the divide, this day was kept and renamed Reconciliation Day.
The late Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi as Home Affairs minister at the time, had the honour of shepherding the process of choosing public holidays through Parliament. Virtually no one talks reconciliation any more, nor is it still relevant.
The bigger project was supposed to be “nation building”, but even that has lost its allure. It is now more politically profitable to advance divisive politics to please an electorate increasingly desperate with its condition. No racial group is happy, with nationalist and narrow identity politics taking centre stage.
Even outside racial laagers, political discourse is on the prowl for “others” on whom to pin South Africa’s social, economic and governance ills. For example, immigration is a hot political topic due to South Africa’s broken immigration management system. So, it is more expedient to blame foreign nationals for every problem we experience regardless of why or how they came to be here.
Some months ago I attended an international conference at the University of Stellenbosch. There I bumped into a Nigerian writer I have followed for years, and we took and posted a picture on Twitter. To many who commented, I had lost my legitimacy for even sharing a space with a non-South African who was visiting for a few days.
Xenophobia
And so like narrow nationalism, xenophobic sentiment stalks the land, stoked by politicians who care less about solving the problem and more about getting votes. Their solution is implied, and that is to rough up anyone who is believed to be a foreign national, or anyone who employs them, whatever the circumstances.
Yet, I grew up being taught by teachers from Ghana who intermarried with locals, and produced children who are as South African as one can be. Those children intermarried further, but the great-grandchildren use their paternal surname. Sometimes these South Africans are subjected to terrible comments that urge them to “go back home”.
These are South Africans who, like the rest of us, are supposed to be part of the welding needed to birth a nation with a real identity, and to whom “Youth Day” is supposed to mean something. The reality is that whether someone was born here like me, or became a citizen later, there is nothing in the way that we mark our historical days that provokes any sense of remembrance, pride or purpose.
This is no accident. We have over the past 30 years come to accept that the ability and credibility to minister to society is not a requirement for leadership. Everything comes down to “policy” or “solutions”. These are important, but policies and laws are supposed to reflect a nation’s overall mission.
Yet, were it to be suggested that all historical public holidays must be done away with so that we have more economically productive days, there would be an outcry. Justifiably, there would be accusations of attempting to erase history. That suggests that at a deeper level, South Africans yearn for meaning in our political and public life, but there is none. So we all amble along meaninglessly, giving individual meaning to the sense of national drift we know is now part of our DNA.
This is one of the reasons we at RISE Mzansi believe that we should review our public holidays and seriously consider renaming them. Human Rights Day should really be Sharpeville Day to remind us and future generations of the things that must never happen again. The same is true of Youth Day, which should be another deeply solemn occasion that annually compels us to interrogate the state of South Africa’s youth and all the ways we continue to systematically brutalise them.
National purpose
It is not just public holidays that need a new lease of life, but our entire nation building mission as a whole. We cannot have a national identity without commonly accepted national values that anchor our public life. We cannot build a culture of success without a national purpose either.
Had we had both, 15 December would not have been just another day that passes by with no meaning even though it was also borne of another historical event, the Springboks winning the Rugby World Cup for the fourth time. Or the fact that it was the most catalytic moment of national unity in a very long time that has now gone to waste.
We cannot infuse purpose-driven leaders into leaders who are obsessed with power for its own sake, or that political success lies in promulgating laws whose purpose no one internalises anyway. Our nation-building project can only succeed under the stewardship of visionary leadership that seeks to unite South Africans. Such leadership will harness their collective energy towards national goals that finally eliminate from our national life the material conditions that remind millions of South Africans why we remain apart.
Ultimately, a day like Reconciliation Day will have meaning when the speeches and ceremony that commemorate it are not just platitudes, but collective recommitments to do right and to do better, and to poke at the wounds that continue to fester beneath the surface so we can heal them. Such is a delicate and deliberate task of leadership so that finally we may be a nation whose traumas are firmly in the past, rather than being papered over with meaningless commemorations no one wants to participate in any longer.
It is when all of us own the purpose for which these holidays exist that we will begin to see real non-racialism, justice and equality. As abstract as the notion of nation building may sound, no nation ever becomes one when nothing unites its people. No nation succeeds when its people are divided.
Ultimately, our strength will lie in our ability to work and live together, to share the same goals and purpose, and be anchored by mutual value. DM
So Sharpville day will unite us? I think Buthelezi was more reconciliatory that it now seems your vision of how to fix things is
A lingering problem was that immediately pre-1994 and in the government that arose from those elections, there was lots of compromising, deemed necessary at the time, as politicians tried to square the circle and please everybody. So we got Mbeki’s vague promise to Viljoen that there would be some sort of discussion over or provision for self determination. We ended up with way too many official languages (Mandela had proposed one language – English. De Klerk had said that his people would not accept this, that Afrikaans must be given the same status as English. Mandela then said that he couldn’t tell Pedi, Xhosa and other groupings that their language was somehow not going to get the same status as Afrikaans, which was not an important language internationally). We got a national anthem that was cobbled together from two tunes from very different constituencies. It was all about not causing offence, and little to do with grasping nettles that needed grasping. Maybe it was necessary then, but the legacy lingers. Which is what politicians should learn: What they enact today will reverberate for years.
Multiple languages and cultures is a strength not a weakness. We should all make a greater effort to learn more than one of our national languages.
Is it a strength!…… it’s spouted all over the world by p9liticians but it complicates.a dozen + years back in London I went to sort out my very elderly prescription at the surgery. There were touch screens in many languages, many not even using the alphabet.
……now of course you can’t even get to see a doctor
Yes, diversity is a strength, because it teaches us that our own perceptions are not the sum total of the world. But to abuse these differences to divide us, as most of the political parties so much try to do during every election campaign, that is where the problem lies, in other words not in the diversity, but in the lack of common purpose, especially be politicians. Actually Bob above is right; in the 1990’s these arrangements were cobbled together as a compromise to accommodate each other (the political parties, that is). Maybe it is now time, now that a new generation has taken over, to take the matters further and to give new meaning to what was done, and maybe even to remove some of these holidays and arrangements that are actually are more divisive than it is unifying. The focus must be on using the diversity to enrich ourselves, instead of trying to keep the old (apartheid?) conflicts and divisions going.
Also supremely ironic, is it not, that Zibi preaches reconciliation, after starting a new little rats-and-mice party because him and his mates couldn’t, ahem, reconcile with any other existing party. No self-awareness here whatsoever.
Why should Sharpeville Day/21 March be a holiday at all? I think many of these holidays were actually chosen as holidays more because the politicians were hell-bent on focusing on the divisions of the past. And even 16 December – if it divides us, should it still be a holiday? Nothing prevents those who took the oath of the Covenant to arrange with their employers to take a days’ leave in order to respect their commitments. I am in perfect agreement with Songezo Zibi that it is time the politicians start to unite instead of divide us – and those that don’t want to, must be kicked out by US, THE VOTERS. After all, the overwhelming majority of us don’t want to be divided, and we are actually living in harmony with each other in spite of them. But why do we still tolerate them or their political parties? We as voters should start to assert ourselves towards those who are elected to serve us instead of eating up all their nonsence. And the question is why are we still tolerating political parties like the ANC and EFF who does not want to allow us, the voters, to vote for party candidates as individuals, so we instead of the party leaders can decide on who must represent us? It is time we kick all these quasi-leaders (which by the way, include Malema, because he is giving NO leadership, he is just always trying to manipulate the voters, and that is not leadership at all) AND their political parties out and replace them with others that are sincere with doing their jobs.
Perhaps public holidays should only celebrate things that assist unity – like winning a world cup, or the day the democratic election gave birth to South Africa – there might not be many. But any day like June 16, sharpeville day, December 16th Dingaan Day will always provide politicians with a day to spout division for political purpose.
The author makes some valid points and the argument is well made. However one indication of factionalism and lack of national focus is the plethora of political parties which reflect the tribal and cultural differences. The country is actually pulling itself apart rather than accepting unity and superficial differences.
Songezo, respectfully, I do not think changing the names of public holidays will do anything… I believe the answer is to instil a sense of purpose into South Africans, you elude to this in your text and I agree with you. So how do you propose to do this? We at UKZN civil engineering are getting our students involved with community projects, industry mentorship and improving campus life. We define purpose-driven as striving for a higher sense of meaning and values and we hope to develop future leaders through this process.
What you say makes sense, including the community projects that you expose the students too. But a common sense of purpose can’t be reached, in my opinion, without starting to focus on telling the truth to our people. That means calling the holidays what they are for instead of all these nationalist narratives that are actually mostly designed to distract the attention from those things that really matter. Because the truth is that what matters to the public is the safety of their families and children; a healthy environment; better education; quality services; and economic growth. But the politicians DO NOT WANT US TO BE FOCUSED ON THAT; it is too difficult to achieve and then to explain their failures in the process. But that is actually why we are electing them. And the real truth is never divisive; in fact to call the truth as it is is actually the real “poking at the wounds that fester beneath the surface” as Songezo mentions it, because even if it hurts, it then gives us the chance to incisively debate it and to get to an agreement on what is right and what is wrong about it. And I want to be represented by a politician who is prepared to do THAT, not by all these hypocrates that keep manipulating us so they can stay in power.
Atheists and people enjoy the Christmas break, while, I suspect, churches aren’t that full. Would renaming it change anything? I doubt that all but a few French people celebrate Bastille Day as anything but a holiday. It’s social engineering at its worst telling people what to feel and do on public holidays. I think of Sharpeville in March as everyone stocks up for a party. So what. A better idea would be to make holidays for everyone except emergency workers. Great empty supermarkets and shops while ” the family” is celebrating – it’s sad that it’s nigh on impossible to co-ordinate a day off for the whole family for people working in retail. Why? If we had a government that improved anything we would feel something good all year round, and that’s more important.
I suppose it would be difficult to justify a Sharpville Day without first dealing with what happened at Marikana? It’s not reasonable for anybody to note the former but try as hard as possible to forget the latter. Which in my mind would be just a political show in hypocrisy.
There is already a set of values, entrenched as the supreme law of the country, that we can get behind.
When I applied to become a Citizen I was concerned that there may be a final stumbling block. Say I had to swear allegiance to the office of President, or to the government of the day.
But I didn’t. What I had to do was swear to uphold and defend the Constitution. There’s a set of broad, decent values right there. It’s the best shot we have at definining a common South African identity.
At least Mr Zibi has taken an overt stand against the twin curses of nationalism and xenophobia which cheapen so much of our political agenda these days. Refreshing and honest. The guys peddling this stuff are liars, selling us a dream that can never come true. And there’s been quiet enough of that in this country.
Reconciliation requires truth and accountability, qualities that are very much absent in these times. Our own government is completely incapable of separating important issues and problems of the past from self made failures driven by greed and incompetence.
Say what you like about BEE and affirmative action, in it’s current form and in combination with the government procurement system, it is little more than a scheme to enrich cadres and criminals. This has little to do with reconciliation, as little as the ANC trying to pass the buck for its serial failures over nearly 30 years for absolutely everything that has gone wrong on Apartheid, white people in general or WMC.
Is it possible to have reconciliation in society that protects people that are “not calling for the slaughtering of whites, at least for now”, or that want to forbid us from criticizing the country and rather emulate an oppressive regime such as China?
Renaming public holidays in light of this seems a bit like rearranging deck chairs on the titanic.
Well said Karl. Add to that the anc insisting that we have official racial groups instead of all just being South Africans, permeates the divide even more than culture.
Very, very well said Karl….The hatred and call for the elimination of white Afrikaners by ‘certain individuals’ is DEMONIC AND NO RENAMING OF ANY DAY WILL RECTIFY THAT!!
Well said Karl and agree with you 100%!!
So diversity is not our strength after all.
Nailed it. Diversity is always, without exception, difficult, something to be managed and causes conflict.
And accepted. There is little diversity in a desert but plenty in a forest. I prefer the forest.
My father, the Late Dr Franz Auerbach, was asked by President Mandela to work with all the religious organisations of South Africa to define what values make up a loyal South African. As Secretary of the National Religious Leaders’ Forum, Dad was asked to bring the various religions together to discuss what values were common to all South Africans. This “Moral Summit” came up with the “Ubuntu Pledge” including ten values that all South Africans should espouse. These included tolerance, multi-culturalism, multi-lingualism and integrity. A million pamphlets were printed in all South African languages, to be distributed in schools, but as far as I know, this was never done. I heard that the pamphlets are still sitting in a store-room in a Catholic church in Johannesburg. We have a picture of Madiba signing the pledge, with our father looking on happily. Perhaps it is now time to bring out those pamphlets? I agree with Songezo that we need to find common values if the new South Africa is to rise out of the ashes of State Capture.
Raymond, I think we had to list the common values of our entire nation in 2023 it would not be a pretty list. Selfishness / entitlement would probably come out near the top.
Before 1994 (some) churches expressed strong views and condemned the government and policy both domestically and internationally. Where are the churches nowadays? I’m not saying they must pick a party, but they can condemn the policies and corruptness of the government as being against basic values. The church congregation is bigger than union membership, yet churches punch far below their weight.
Values without leadership unfortunately will remain just words on pamphlets in a storage room. The fact that Mandela simply initiated the process showed that he was looking beyond the immediate problems and creating vision for our shared future. Name one politician today who talks this language?
I know a wise Afrikaner who simply defined Apartheid as institutionalised disrespect. And that in 1994, the institutional part of Apartheid was dismantled but not necessarily the disrespect.
But I believe South Africans have come a long way. I think we have moved from disrespect to tolerance but not to understanding or compassion. Go to the UK, USA, russia the East and most of Europe and you still find racial disrespect sewn deep into their DNA. I believe we have moved on from there but clearly have a long way to go. Unfortunately with lack of a true leader, we regress. Ramaphosa showed signs of it when he first became President but he has severely disappointed. Just look how we long for such a future with the World Cup victory celebrated by most South Africans. Half a leader would have grabbed onto that initiative and built onto it. All we got was a deferred public holiday.
I agree that our Constitution lays the foundation of the future we all desire. We just need politicians to make it happen. Not difficult actually but we first need to stop their pillaging and self indulgence.
Yes!
Raymond, the problem is that even to distribute pamphlets in schools are not enough. What should happen is that the political leaders of all groups should come together and get to an agreement on what all South Africans agree is what SA is all about – and then that should be worked into the syllabases in the schools on a permanent basis so it can become part of the way our children think. I don’t think it should be forced down onto children though; they should have a choice in whether to commit to it, but they must have knowledge of the project. And those ten values that you spoke about (as far as I know it was defined by the late dr. Johann Broodryk in his doctoral thesis, “Ubuntuism as a Worldview to Order Society”) can still be used in the process. My point is however that the government must be consistently promoting unity; unfortunately it mostly tries to promoting the divisions because it values itself more than SA. Such a pity that Madiba decided to retire from the Presidency in 1999 – he should have stayed another term to see that these values ARE properly asserted. I wonder if the ANC would have allowed him if he wanted to stay on.
This party gets my vote. i long for somthing new!
The comments are valid Mr Zibi.
But where do we start and who drives that, I mean championing it, as it is not part of the current structures or NPOs as far as I know, correct me if I’m wrong.!!!!
Really now? That kinda funny as i don’t think naming a public holiday anything different is going to make it stand out!! As long as the corrupt ANC government carries on raping this country, no public holiday will ever mean anything!!
You are right that there is nothing the various groups have in common, whuch applies to all countries except those few (if any) with homogenous populations. But you are wrong to imagine that can change,considering our different incomes, cultures, education and interests. Race is the least of it. You talk about something NEW but you are just peddling motherhood and apple pie. We don’t need unity we need a competent honest governnent and non political educated officials to adminster the departments of state and a criminal justice system that is capable of enforcing the law. That might seem tough but not as tough as trying to reconcile the unreconciliable.
When all of us? Unachievable. You need to be realistic and practical. Realistically, SA is at war, reconciliation day or not. We will not stop fighting because you or even Mandela say so. We will stop fighting when the victims of the SA war see a possible future and have reasons to live and not just survive.
Interesting that you chose to highlight the discrimination against second generarion South Africans. I am a 14th generation (white Afrikaner) South African but according to many/most South Africans and many voices internationally I am a land thief that should go back home.
I sincerely think Mr. Zibi is the person with the background (rural), experience ( politics, business, and media), and most importantly, empathy, to lead South Africa. Perhaps not next year, but big hopes for the election after. The leadership of Rise Mzansi has shown excellent focus in building their platform around actual public engagement with those who need help the most i.e. the majority of South Africans. It seems crazy to say it, but almost no other political group has managed this since 1994.
As a somewhat cynical person I don’t usually feel much for ‘nation-building’ and ‘shared national purpose’ but Mr. Zibi has clearly laid out that it absolutely does matter if we want to progress. To me this is becoming a hallmark of Rise Mzansi – an attractive pragmatism allowing us to be patriotic without being naive. We NEED the buy in of all parts of society, this is not optional as many other leading opposition parties will tell you (openly or otherwise.)
What a political breath of fresh air to have a leader speak of nation building rather than nation breaking. Rethinking public holidays to celebrate and build on the best we have to offer as a nation – this makes us think of who we are and where we want to go as a nation together – because it can only work if it’s together. It’s been long since South Africa has had leaders that speak of building rather than spewing divisive rhetoric. Something positive in the 2024 is that civil society is regrouping and putting new options on the ballot sheets, Rise Mzansi, Zackie Achmat – this brings hope. There are many South Africans who care.
Absolutely. I am encouraging just about everyone I know to spend some time reading up on Rise’s platform, easily accessible online. It’s time for South Africans (at least the mostly-white ones I know) to get off their collective butts and become political. We have this terrible, cynical tendency in the suburbs to simply throw eggs from the comfort of our chairs. If I had a few rand for every person who ‘doesn’t read the news’ …
I agree with Bob. We need something far more concrete than values. We need one common thing to bind us together, and that is an identity as being first and foremost a SOUTH AFRICAN. Let all Tribalism and Nationalism come second to the critical fact of all being SOUTH AFRICAN. And what better way to begin that journey than to have a common language one that we all can communicate together?
1 Common Language, English and let all other languages be maintained within their groupings. A pity we did not do this from the beginning as Bob Dubery mentioned. [We ended up with way too many official languages (Mandela had proposed one language – English. De Klerk had said that his people would not accept this, that Afrikaans must be given the same status as English. Mandela then said that he couldn’t tell Pedi, Xhosa and other groupings that their language was somehow not going to get the same status as Afrikaans, which was not an important language internationally).]
Jobs day.
It is the greatest crime against humanity it is possible to imagine that an out of touch bunch of old men, can hang on to 19th century ideology, thus condemning 70% of our youth to a future where they will never have meaningful employment.
Forget all the other issues …. we need a Jobs day, that is real work rather than “make believe, pretend, “Government Creation” employment.
But that would mean ditching in it’s entirety, all ANC/EFF economic policy, and that won’t happen because it is the only way this miserable shower can hang on to the perks and salaries they extort under the present dispensation.
The UK had a similar problem 300 odd years ago that prompted Lord Blacksone to write his Commentaries on the laws of England. The so-called English were in truth a mixture if Danes, Saxons, Italians, Celtic and others each with their unique culture, religion and beliefs. One of the first directives was the acknowledgment of a superior force common to all that we all worship albeit in different ways. The second was to accept that we are all totally dependent on this divine force. It’s a long work but suffice to say we need to get the basics right before we even start looking at the details