during Heritage Day celebrations, Gugulethu Heritage Trail
24 September 2007
Thank you very much, Enkosi kakhulu, baie dankie Minister Whitey Jacobs.
Minister Jacobs is probably the most important Minister who must make this
vision of a home for all a reality. I want to greet and acknowledge our
councillors who are present, who in their work everyday, deal with some of the
most difficult problems that our people face, housing, sanitation, water,
electricity and cleaning our streets and other related responsibilities.
I want to acknowledge our poets who are here. I cannot give James Mathews a
higher acknowledgement than what the President has given him. He is part of
that great conveyer belt of poets, of artists that the Western Cape is
producing. I want to say to all of you who have come here thank you very much
for coming to spend Heritage Day with us.
I must say that I was very disappointed when I heard that there are people
who have decided that they are going to turn Heritage Day into national Braai
Day. I do not have anything against braais but when you take an important day
such as Heritage Day and turn it into a national Braai Day and then there is
something wrong. Then I think we are not using the opportunity to pay respect
to those who have been the architects of this diversity that we have and the
unity that we need to forge.
We have to remember people such as Amy Bhiell, who came from America and
lost her life in South Africa for a cause that we all understood. Here was the
Gugulethu seven, young people who gave up their lives so that our children
today can be free. The people to whom our poet James Mathews has paid tribute
to such as Steve Biko and others.
They died before they could taste the freedom that we are enjoying today. So
the question we must ask ourselves is: Can we squander? Can we waste? Can we be
less free with this freedom we have? With this democracy that we have, when
others have died before they saw it as a reality? Oliver Tambo, one of the
greatest leaders that the African National Congress has produced, was on the
threshold of the promise land when his life was ended.
Chief Albert Luthuli, another President of the African National Congress, in
1961, when he saw his comrades such as former President Nelson Mandela, Walter
Sisulu go to Robben Island and Oliver Tambo go into exile. He saw the people
killed in Sharpville and yet when he was asked what is your vision of South
Africa? He said that South Africa will be a home for all. He was echoing the
freedom charter which said South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black
and white. That is our heritage, a heritage of great generosity, even to those
who oppressed us. Chief Luthuli could have said, get rid of the Whites because
they killed our people in Sharpville. Chief Luthuli could have said get rid of
the whites because they sent Nelson Mandela to jail and Oliver Tambo into
exile.
Yet Chief Luthuli had the generosity of spirit to say: let us make this
country a home for all, let it be a place all of us can live in together. That
is why on an occasion such as Heritage Day, we must enjoy ourselves, but we
must have those moments when we sit down quietly, when we think about where we
come from, when we give thanks for where we are, where we commit ourselves to
attain the rest of the freedom that we must still go and fetch which is not
with us today.
People who forget their heroes will soon lose themselves, a people who
forget who and where they come from will not know where they are going to. As
the national government has called us, let us celebrate our poetry. So we call
together our poets today, and we say to them; share with us your poetry, not
only because it is beautiful to the ear, but because it tells our story,
because it reminds us of whom we are as people. It tells us when we are
different and when we are the same.
You see, in South Africa, we have a unique right that comes from our
constitution. The right in the first place is to be different. There is nothing
wrong with someone speaking Xhosa, Afrikaans or English in the Western Cape. We
have the right to be different and to speak our languages. There is nothing
wrong with someone worshiping in a church, with someone worshiping in the
Mosque and someone else worshiping in the Synagogue or in a temple. We have the
right to worship differently.
There is nothing wrong with someone having a white skin, another brown skin
and someone else a black skin. We have the right to be different because that
is given to us by God. We have the right to eat different foods, someone may
want Currie, someone may want fish and chips and someone may want pap and wors.
We have the right to eat different things. We have the right to drink different
things, some of us can drink alcohol and some of us cannot drink alcohol. But
we have the right to be different.
But today it was a day when I would have thought that all our communities
would respond to the call, to celebrate our poetry. Here was the opportunity
for that history of Afrikaans poetry to come forward and maybe to find in each
other. Could we have combined the poetry of Adam Small with the poetry of
Eugene Murray? Could we have thought whether Eugene Murray or another white
Afrikaans poet could have written about the Anglo Boer War, but he could have
spoken about the same freedom that we want, only he wants for his own people
and not for all people. Could we have reconciled all of those poems?
Could we have brought together the poetry that comes from the communities in
the Western Cape when they saw the Khoi and the San being killed, when they saw
the destruction of someone such as Sarah Baartman, her humiliation or when they
witnessed the destruction of the Khoi and the San language and the slavery of
our people? It may have been the same call that came out from the poetry of the
Eastern Cape when the Xhosa tribes were facing one way of colonialism after the
other at the Fish River, the Kei River and all the other places where the
heroic battles were fought. We may have spoken about different places, one in
the Western Cape and one in the Eastern Cape, different people, some with the
light skin in the Western Cape, some with the darker skins in the Eastern Cape,
speaking different languages, the Khoi and the san language here and the Xhosa
language in the Eastern Cape. But we may have spoken about the same desire for
freedom, the same desire for equality, the same desire to be human and the same
desire to belong and not to be dispossessed in this country.
Why is it that communities do not grab the opportunity to tell that story,
to reconcile all our stories and to say, that maybe the human condition is the
same, the human yearning for freedom is the same, the human yearning for
equality is the same, the human yearning for dignity is the same, maybe we
could have discovered each other in that way, but yet, there are some of us who
try to celebrate only in our own corners, in our own group areas in our own
home lands in the new South Africa. There are mental and psychological home
lands, mental and psychological group areas, mental and psychological corners
in which we want to celebrate.
We want to come together under the banner of separate organisations and then
we want to have a torch light and then we want to have a night dedicated to one
poem or one poet. I think what South Africa requires is not to lose the diverse
heritage of poetry, but to find more opportunities for all poets to come
together to exchange poetry, to argue and debate amongst each other for meaning
and to come to a conclusion about why our poetry is diverse. The human meaning
may be the same. That is why we may have spoken about freedom. For some, the
time now is to speak of freedom for all. We must find equality amongst all
people.
I think that it is a miss-opportunity that not too many communities have
come to say this is our poetry; we want to add it to the overall poetry that
exists in South Africa. We want to make this our contribution to this home for
all so that we can be different but we can also be united with everyone else.
There is no reason for us in the Western Cape to remain separate and divided,
calling each other all kinds of derogatory names. I think that we must use this
Heritage Day to say that we no longer want our White communities to retire
behind the big walls with alarm systems and security companies on stand by. We
have to be able to say: for you, the Western Cape must be a home for all, join
the home for all and let us build it together.
No longer must we have a situation where so called coloured communities are
insecure, believing that they are not black enough and they are not white
enough, not knowing where they belong or what their identity is. We must say to
them, your identity can only be defined when you reach out to others, Black on
the one side, whites on the other side and see who you are, believe who you are
and understand that you do not have to be White or you do not have to be black,
you only have to be human and you only have to reach out to others, and you
only have to be living your own equality. Die Wes Kaap is 'n tuiste vir
almal.
We must say, as we are saying to Gugulethu today, that we know that this
Western Cape has been particularly unfriendly to African people. We know that
this Western Cape has been a place where Xhosa speaking people were not allowed
to come in unless they had a job. That if the husband had a job the wife has to
stay with the children in the home lands. We know that, that when families
wanted to be joined together here in Cape Town, they were bulldozed at Cross
Roads, bulldozed at KTC and bulldozed wherever they put up their homes. We know
that, that is the history. We know that apartheid has tried to create conflict
particularly between African and Coloured by making Coloureds the supervisor
and African the labourer. We know that, that has worked. We know that we call
each other bad names, kaffirs, boere and hotnots.
Today, we must say on Heritage Day, Intshona Koloni ikhaya lethu sonke. It
may be that the politicians may not be able to succeed completely in building
this unity, we know as the elections come closer, then people are of the
opinion that everything that politicians say, is for votes. I think that if we
want the Western Cape to be a home for all, if we want our people to be united,
if we want our communities to come together, if we want every citizen to claim
their citizenship in the Western Cape, then maybe we must ask as we start to
ask today Minister Jacobs, maybe we must ask our poets, can you pick up where
we are not able to do it?
We cannot afford for our wisdom to retire, we cannot afford for our artists
to stand back, we cannot afford any of our musicians to not sing the songs of
unity and sing the songs that challenge us as we go forward. We need a vibrant
debate and it cannot only be a debate of pros. It cannot only be a debate of
government speakers; it has to be a debate where the poets join us again and
protest against the divisions, protest against disunity and protest against the
difficult things in our society.
We need your voice again and we need you to come forward because we do not
have all the wisdom to take this forward. I think that we are shaking the era
of our poets once again, to speak to us from the depths of their soul and to be
in our conscious all the time because if they do not do it, no one else will.
Our children are losing their heritage; they are the victims of MTV and of
Hollywood.
They are the victims of single forms of music, they are the victims of
single forms of genres and we need you to remind us that our richness cannot be
sacrificed on the altar of Hollywood or MTV. We have our own music, we have our
own drama, we have our own poetry and we have our own art. We cannot
americanise the whole world. We cannot make the whole world uniform. We are
losing our heritage and our children are becoming more americanised rather than
being proud Africans. We must push back the American way of making culture
uniform across the world, making it the common denominator amongst all
people.
If our children are going to be proud of whom they are they must be proud of
who their parents are and who their grand parents and previous generations
were. That is the story that only our poets can tell. Happy Heritage Day, enjoy
it and may we remember all of those who have sacrificed so that we can be free.
Let us call upon our poets to take their rightful place and speak to our
consciousness because we do not have all the answers that our country needs in
order to make this place we live in a home for all.
Thank you very much.
Issued by: Office of the Premier, Western Cape Provincial Government
24 September 2007
