Cultural preservation: The black tax that enriches

It's New Year's Day, 2020. My father phones for the fifth time in 24 hours. He wants to know what my brother and I did the night before - nothing; how we're getting on - fine; and whether we need any food - no, thank you.

Then he cuts to the chase. He needs his passport. I rummage through his drawers while he directs me over the phone, and pull out the little green book that is his safe passage out of SA.

He needs my brother to drive the one-hour journey from our home in the city to our family's rural village, where my father currently is, and deliver the passport by hand.

My brother is still asleep when I knock on his door to inform him of his first task of the new year. Needless to say, he is not happy.

The instruction to drop everything and respond to the call of an older person (specifically a father) is just one of many duties that embody the burden of what I call African obligation.

It's the countless hours spent listening to elders in smoky village huts or driving guests back to their homes. It's the cooking, the cleaning, the praying, the waiting.

I was born into a biracial family. My mother is white and converted to Christianity in her early 20s. My father is black - Xhosa, to be more precise - and also Christian, although he later adopted with fervour the practices of what they call "African traditional spirituality".

I grew up balancing these antithetical worlds of the two sides of my family. Christmases spent with my mother's family meant Santa Claus, mountains of gifts and trips to the beach.

Christmases in the village meant slaughtering two sheep, wearing a skirt at all times and checking in with a never-ending litany of distant relatives' traditional ceremonies. Time spent with the black family can be exhausting.

As I've got older, however, I've participated in these activities with less of the grudge I carried as a child. I know they are important because they are integral to what it means to live in a black community.

In the Eastern Cape, where I grew up, June and December are the months for umcimbi - celebration. Whether it's to celebrate initiates coming back from the bush as men or to thank the ancestors, there is always cause for umcimbi.

Aunts, uncles, grandmothers, cousins, cousins twice removed, grandmothers of cousins twice removed - all manner of distant relatives descend on your family's rural home like a flock returning to the fold.

Then the work begins. I cannot tell you the hours that go into community events and esoteric spiritual practices; the money that is spent on the necessary booze, food and transportation.

Coming home is like putting on a parallel-universe hat, where all my trusted mental frameworks crumble in the face of collective duty, or what I call the black tax of cultural preservation.

Productivity, efficiency, personal cost-benefit analysis - all of these concepts are thrown out of the window. Two weeks in the village will rewire your internal clocks and reprogram your priorities.

Cultural black tax goes beyond the call of duty to maintain the financial and psychological wellbeing of the people you love.

I realised it was a tax when I contrasted the duties expected of me with those expected of my white friends, for example.

I cannot tell you the hours that go into community events and esoteric spiritual practices; the money that is spent on the necessary booze, food and transportation

From what I've observed, my white friends are not born with an implicit obligation to be Keepers of the Culture. The survival of a language does not rest on their shoulders.

They do not go through this world questioning whether they carry themselves in ways that further or hinder a collective identity that is still building itself up after centuries of oppression.

From this side of the fence, there are times when that freedom seems pretty attractive. Black culture, African culture, Xhosa culture, the culture of your own clan - there is an implicit obligation on all people who claim to belong to these groups to carry that culture like a rare, sacred inheritance. The obligation also says that if we do not fulfil our duties, that culture will die with us.

I worry whether my children will be able to speak Xhosa as I feel my own grasp of the language slipping away.

If I continue living abroad, I wonder whether my daughters will ever have the experience of spreading cow dung on a hut floor, or whether my sons will go through the traditional rites of passage given to young Xhosa men. Probably not. Will they know their own clan names? Not unless I tell them.

But even if I tell them, will it be enough? If the father of my children is a white man, at what point will my offspring cease to be "black"?

Having grown up straddling polar identities and mastering the art of racial fluidity, I know more intimately than most that as much as cultural identity is inherited, it is also a choice.

I have lived in seven countries across all continents. In the eyes of others, my race has run the gamut from white to Latino, to black and even Indian.

Racial identity is a man-made construct. When someone tells you "I am black", more often than not what they are telling you is that they culturally identify as black. You may find they are in fact one-quarter white and one-eighth Indian (to even use these terms makes me cringe).

When the world is sufficiently brown, if you ask me, race will become just as illusory and anti-modern as the study of eugenics. Race will fade - quite literally.

Culture is trickier to grasp. The biggest thing I have learnt from my Xhosa family is that culture is not a static accessory we wear when the occasion calls for "celebrating our roots" - it is a reflection of collective identity that manifests in everyday, mundane, sometimes arduous tasks that shape who we are as a people. In other words, culture is a verb, not a noun. And verbs require action. Action implies responsibility.

Culture is burdensome. But it is also beautiful. Culture can be backward. But there are moments when it saves us. It is precarious and fragile, yet substantive and timeless. We recreate it every day, incorporating what makes sense and releasing what no longer serves us.

The challenge to the black child is knowing when to hold on and when to let go - and how to balance this act in a world that neither values nor understands what she is doing.

I do not envy my brother as he prepares himself for the journey to deliver the little green book. But I understand why he must do what he is doing. It isn't a choice. He might be 24 years old, but in this household, parents are obeyed. We often joke that one day, we'll be old enough to simply say "no", but there will still be implicit "yeses" expected of us that we may never escape. Perhaps "escape" is the wrong word. Matters of identity are not so much a burden as a call to fulfil a greater destiny.

The hidden black tax of cultural preservation might better be described as a "down payment" or "investment". We are not just individuals, but knitted into a history, a community, a place. We owe it to posterity to preserve, discerningly, the culture that rests on our shoulders.

• Mqamelo is an economics and data science student who has lived in eight countries in the past two years as part of her programme at Minerva.