The newly democratic South African government established Heritage Day in 1995 as a public holiday on 24 September to celebrate the nation’s cultural history and diversity. South Africa’s National Heritage Council defines heritage as “what is preserved from the past as the living collective memory of a people not only to inform the present about the past but also to equip successive generations to fashion their future.”
Commemorating the first celebration of the holiday in 1996, President Nelson Mandela recognised that “our rich and varied cultural heritage has a profound power to help build our new nation.”
On Heritage Day in 2002, Mandela also noted the holiday‘s importance for “consolidating our national identity as one of unity within diversity”.
How does Heritage Day contribute to nation-building and promote unity amid diversity? How does it guide efforts to fashion our future? After all, most people think of heritage as the nation’s recent historical events and objects, many of which were and still remain divisive.
They also focus on current expressions of cultural diversity such as that seen in dress, cuisine and music, which tend to accentuate our differences. “Rainbow Nation” rhetoric alone cannot overcome the divisions and injustices of the recent past, for it neither defines commonalities underlying our diversity nor provides a road map to a just and prosperous future.
One must look deeper into our prehistoric past and natural world to realise the unifying, nation-building and future-guiding powers of Heritage Day.
It is from prehistory – the vast period of the nation’s past that precedes written history and is measured in millions of years – that we find the fossil and archaeological evidence for our shared origins in Africa, and for the common humanity that springs from it, unifying everyone everywhere.
Prehistory teaches us that skin colour and other physical traits commonly used to define races form continuums created by the environmental gradients to which they are adaptations, and therefore cannot be used to divide us in anything but arbitrary ways.
Prehistory also teaches that our common humanity developed in natural environments with high biodiversity, before agriculture, pastoralism and later urbanisation, industrialisation and rapid human population growth started to decimate nature.
Prehistory gives us many examples of drastic and rapid environmental changes such as those our activities are causing. If severe, these changes can lead to mass extinctions, a cascading loss of species and the essential means of livelihood and other “services” they provide, threatening the survival of yet more species, including ourselves.
Unesco and the South African Heritage Resource Agency recognise the multidimensionality of heritage. South African World Heritage Sites cited by Unesco for their “outstanding cultural importance” are Robben Island, Mapungubwe Cultural Landscape, the Cradle of Humankind fossil sites, and the Cradle of Human Culture, the latter three extending South Africa’s cultural heritage into recent and remote prehistoric times.
Unesco designates four other World Heritage sites for their biodiversity, natural beauty or for recording major natural historic events (uKhahlamba-Drakensberg Park, Cape Floral Region Protected Areas, iSimangaliso Wetland Park, Vredefort Dome).
Finally, the Richtersveld Cultural and Botanical Landscape is recognised for its intertwined natural and cultural value. South African national heritage sites include Charlotte Maxeke’s grave, the Voortrekker Monument and a number of prehistoric Iron Age, Stone Age and fossil sites.
Our cultural traditions and diversity in recent historic context are important components of our heritage, but our unity and future prosperity are underlain by and depend on an appreciation of our deep prehistoric heritage and the preservation of our rich natural heritage and the biodiversity it sustains.
So, when having a braai on 24 September, dressing in traditional garb or rejoicing in apartheid’s defeat by democracy, don’t forget to celebrate the unity spawned by our ancient shared origins and to consider ways you can preserve the remaining biodiversity on which our future depends. DM