Western Cape Education Department Heritage Day celebrations, Gugulethu
18 September 2007
Enkosi kakhulu, thank you very much, baie dankie. I must say that, whatever
I may say could have not been said better than this performance that we have
just seen. That is the vision we have, a Western Cape that is the home for all.
Not anyone fighting with each other because of differences, but taking all of
those differences and creating harmony in our province. Our country and our
province do not want people to forget who they are and become something
different in multi parts. Our country says, it is important to remember who you
are and then you can contribute that to the new South Africa.
People who have forgotten where they come from have nothing to contribute to
South Africa. People who have given up their roots, have nothing to give to
South Africa, people who turn their on heritage, have nothing to contribute to
South Africa. The struggle that we have in South Africa is for us at the same
time to be different. But that is not the contradiction, how can you be the
same and be different. We are the same, when you stand up here as was
illustrated and we say, I am an African, we are not Asians, we are not
Europeans, we are not Americans, we are Africans and in that respect, all of us
are the same.
We are the same when we say we are South Africans and we are proud to be the
generations that have been set free by Nelson Mandela and all the other
leaders. We are South Africans, whichever colour we are, whichever language we
speak, we are the same. We are the same when we say we are citizens of the
Western Cape and when we say more importantly, that this Western Cape is a home
for all, 'n tuiste vir almal, ikhaya lethu sonke. That is very important
because we know our histories are separate, our histories are divided, our
histories have taught us to despise each other, to hate each other's
differences, to look down on each other, to discriminate on each other. That is
the history of colonialism and that is the history of apartheid.
But more than hating each other's culture, its other's language and
disliking each other's customs and rituals and not respecting it, our history
has also been one in which many of us were taught to turn our back on our own
heritage, we were made ashamed of our own heritage, when we dress in Xhosa
traditional dress, we were even made to hate our history because the history
books only taught us that our own was a savage history. When we put on the
clothes of the minstrels and play their instruments, we were taught to despise
it because they were called fools, as if that singing on New Year's Eve had no
meaning in our lives.
We were made to forget that the tradition of being proudly Xhosa came out of
a proud struggle, one battle after the other to resist colonialism, that it
takes the sacrifice of thousands and thousands of warriors as they resisted at
the Fish River, at the Kei River and every other river that became the battle
field to resist colonialism. We were made to feel ashamed of that entire
history as if it was all savage.
We forget that the history of the mistrals was a celebration of the freeing
of slaves, that when slaves were freed, people broke into songs of freedom, and
we were made to forget it and despise it in much the same way. We can go to
every culture and show how we were made to turn our back on our own heritage
and traditions.
What we are saying, on this heritage day is that all of us must reclaim that
history, that heritage and be proud of where we come from. Because the point of
apartheid is not just that it separated people, Blacks on that side, Whites on
that side, Coloureds on that side, Indians on that side. It was not just that
it made rivals between languages, Xhosa, English, Afrikaans in the Western
Cape. It was not just that it put us in separate areas and separate schools,
that it dispossessed us, took away our land, took away our jobs and took away
our wealth. If apartheid had done only that, then we could have overcome it
through money and through laws.
What apartheid did was to rob us, of our self confidence, of our self
esteem, our self worth, to make us despise ourselves. You cannot be told for
300 years that you are no good, that you are second class, that you are third
class citizens that you are only good to be people who can work in the mines,
people who can work with their hands, people who must carry water to others and
serve others. You cannot be told these untruths for 300 years and on the day
that Dr Nelson Mandela becomes president, we are a confident nation with
confident individuals who know who they are, who know where they come from and
who know where they are going to.
So, Heritage Day is a day in which we call to mind, where we come from last
year, when we celebrated heritage day, each community was forced to go back and
look at the music, to see what musical instruments they were playing, to go and
learn again the songs that kept them alive, that carried their values, that
carried their culture. This year as Minister Jacobs said, the theme is poetry
because each one of us have deep traditions of poetry that carry our values
that carry our messages that carry our traditions and that carry our culture.
We have to go back to that poetry and those rich traditions and see what
meaning they have for us today.
We have to go back to the rich tradition of Xhosa poetry that speaks of the
battles that were fought, the sacrifices that were made, the dispossession of
the land that was experienced, the changing of life from a rural village to the
mines of Johannesburg, which speaks of separations of families as the men went
to the mines and women stayed in the compounds or stayed in the home lands.
We have to go back and fetch that tradition, we have to go back and fetch
the rich tradition that the Malays brought with them and make this part of the
South African heritage. We must not let anyone take any part of our culture
away from us. We have to claim it as the common property of all Africans and
all South Africans. Unless we know where we come from, we will not know where
we are going to. That is why the Western Cape is facing all these difficulties
that we are facing today.
We divide very easily we call each other bad names very easily. Malayers,
kaffirs, hotnots, boere. It is because we are uncomfortable with each other. We
are not comfortable with ourselves so we have to push someone else down.
Because I do not know my own heritage as a coloured, I can only put forward my
superiority by re-insulting someone who is darker in colour than me because
there are other problems in life. Because I do not have the skills, I can only
blame someone with the lighter colour that me.
How do we overcome these things where we become confident in ourselves as
citizens of the Western Cape where we can truly call this Western Cape a home
for all? The starting point is heritage day. Go back into your own history, do
not be ashamed of your history and reclaim your own culture. If Bantu education
distorted Xhosa culture or Sotho culture or whatever culture, take it away from
Bantu education, bring I back, put it through a reforms process and make sure
that we get our own poems back into society, so that we can understand where we
come from.
In much of the Afrikaans poetry, for example, there are lessons to be
learned, even about how Afrikaners had to break free from English colonialism
and fetch a new world for themselves in South Africa even if it was at the
expense of Black people, there are certain things that we can learn from it, we
cannot leave it to one community to interpret it.
So if the Western Cape is truly going to become a home for all, then it does
not mean only about living now or going forward because sometimes when we are
too eager to go into the future we must ask what we are hiding in our past. We
have to be able to say let us go back to our heritage because there are
resources in our heritage that we must carry forward.
Particularly, our teachers, our managers of education, our officials in
Education Department, your job is more than to get through a syllabus, more
that to supervise the education of our children more than the results that must
come at the end of the year. You have the responsibility to build whole people,
people in touch with their past who are confident about their future, that is
your job. We can sort out some of the a's, or b's or c's, not lower than that,
we can sort out some of those things but if you have produced an a, but you
have brought us a distorted person who is ashamed of the past and not confident
about the future, then the education system has not succeeded. If you bring us
people who scored a in Maths and Science but they are not confident about the
future and they blame other people, then you have not succeeded in educating
people properly.
What we have seen here is not a fusion; you have not seen an assimilation of
Malay, Coloured, Xhosa, Indian culture. No one hid their culture from us, each
one was who they were, but they were able to put it together in a way that
showed us the potential of this Western Cape. We must not be ashamed of our
slave history, we must infact, speak to the history of the Khoi and the San in
the Western Cape. These are some of the people whom we hide from our history
books.
If the South African government did not put their language as the motto of
our country, we would not have respected that language. So we need to be able
to face these truths, not in hatred and bitterness in each other, but in
honesty and in reconciliation towards each other. I think we have to be able to
use heritage today to forge a new future but drawing from the past because the
past is rich, it is our entire history, it is our entire value system that is
there.
The greatest danger we face today in terms of our cultures and our heritage
is globalisation. We will forget all the songs, all these music and all these
poetry and remember Hollywood and MTV. This form of music is taking over our
children; it is making our children think that they are only 'cool' when they
imitate Kanye West and other pop stars, that you are only 'cool' when you can
rap and forget the poetry of your own people. You are only 'cool' when you can
act with half of your clothes on rather than the kind of drama that comes from
our own communities.
Because of this reality, we have to make concerted efforts to teach our
children where they come from otherwise we are South Africans reading
Americans. Otherwise, we are Africans preparing people for the future in the
west, not proud of whom they are, but always looking for the opportunities that
Hollywood put into their minds. I am not against America, I am not against
Hollywood, I am calling out parents and teachers to immunise our children
against Hollywood and the Americanisation of all our cultures. These are the
things we have to watch out for.
To end up, I want to thank everyone, particularly Minister Dugmore and
Education Department that have put together this programme, I think it is a
wonderful way to enter a long weekend for heritage day, I am sure that when
Minister Jacobs runs our heritage day on Monday, that we will be able to say we
saw something today in the Gugulethu Sport Centre that will remain with us
forever. The sight of our young children knowing who they are and their
confidence in knowing where they are going to, that is the best we can do in
education.
Thank you very much.
Issued by: Office of the Premier, Western Cape Provincial Government
18 September 2007
