I have beef with what Heritage Day's become — and that’s not a braai joke

Congratulations, we’ve survived long enough to see another public holiday. Just in time for lockdown level 1, too. Yay, us. Thursday is Heritage Day, a holiday that started off as a noble idea (embodying our “unity in diversity”) but is now as much about culture as Valentine’s Day is about love.

I have a beef with what Heritage Day has become — and no, that’s not a braai joke.

If you Google “Heritage Day”, you’ll find this summary: “On this day, South Africans are encouraged to celebrate their culture and the diversity of their beliefs and traditions, in the wider context of a nation that belongs to all its people.”

Rainbow propaganda

Cute, but what does it mean? While I understand its origin (Zulu king Shaka’s day of death) and why it needed to evolve beyond seeming like the celebration of a single ethnic group (South Africans are very sensitive about this), I actually don’t get Heritage Day — what are we meant to do with it, especially now?  

The definition quoted above sounds like early post-apartheid Rainbow Nation propaganda, and it feels painfully out of touch with the country we currently live in.

The idea behind it is beautiful (goodness knows we need all the nation-building we can get), but Heritage Day has become one of the most contentious public holidays in the country — because what on earth is our heritage, anyway? And how are we meant to celebrate it?

For a lot of schools and workplaces, it’s a day when people are encouraged to show up in “traditional attire”.

This is an important exercise for those who spend the other 364 days of the year assimilating to cultures that aren’t theirs, wearing what was decided for us as “appropriate” and “professional”, but part of me finds it as embarrassing as when black people in Africa showed up to watch Black Panther at the cinema in their “traditional African clothes” (hashtag never forget).

As a black person, I support Heritage Day on principle (and no, I won’t call it Braai Day). We need as many opportunities to be publicly proud of our cultures as we can get, and the chance to show that in our dress.

Heritage Day is one of the few occasions where showing up at the office in a neon-pink and -yellow Sepedi number is not just accepted but expected. If you were to dress up like that on a random Tuesday, you would be met with an almost anthropological curiosity.

Culture as costume

But it always feels to me like we are cosplaying our own cultures: instead of attending a comic book convention and dressing up as Spider-Man, we’re dressed in our cultural attire, pleasing everyone at the office as we twirl for them and show all of our teeth in the group pictures to be uploaded to Facebook.

We have turned our own cultures into costumes, and on that day, those beautiful, bright colours and intricate patterns feel about as meaningful as Halloween or fancy-dress outfits. It seems to be more about performing pride than actually being proud of one’s cultural attire.

This isn’t to suggest I have been immune to this in the past. I, too, have dressed up a handful of times, and — I’m embarrassed to say this — once considered wearing my seshweshwe wedding dress to the office on Heritage Day before I came to my senses.

There is nothing wrong with the fact that many of us today only rock traditional wear for ceremonial reasons. But attending a wedding or umcimbi in cultural clothing actually holds significance and is a celebration of who we (diversely) are. To be harsh about it, it’s not cheap cosplay to fit in with the office party theme.

What was meant to be a nation-building exercise has become —  at the risk of sounding alarmist —  a nation-splitting exercise

What was meant to be a nation-building exercise has become — at the risk of sounding alarmist — a nation-splitting exercise. Calling it National Braai Day is better for unification, some say. Of course those with “no heritage” would say that, is the retort.

Jerusalema

But maybe that’s where the problem lies: a day meant to celebrate our diversity is slowly being turned into a one-size-fits-all exercise. After all, as Fred Khumalo so beautifully expressed last week, “we are [a] patchwork quilt of cultures”.

Because of the politicisation of culture (and everything else in SA, quite frankly), it was always a tall order to expect Heritage Day to be a heart-warming 12 hours of unity in our diversity, especially when some heritage has better PR than others.

From that standpoint, it’s understandable that the hotly contested holiday is so often targeted for a re-brand, because at the moment our diversity is divisive.

What message will advertisers use to get us to part with our money if we can’t even agree on what heritage really means for us?

So they try to replace one form of forced unity with another (in this case, beer and boerewors). Heritage has been co-opted for commercialisation in the same way that Christmas is more about presents and oven roasts than it is about religious belief.

This is also the way that pre-pandemic Youth Day was about brand campaigns, free concerts and adults getting wasted in school uniforms (something that feels distasteful, considering that kids were murdered in those uniforms while they were fighting to change the course of history in this country).

I’m not, for even a second, suggesting we get rid of Heritage Day — goodness no, we need as many public holidays as we can get! In fact, give us more, Mr Government (I’m only half-joking).

 So what’s the ideal way to celebrate Heritage Day — going to a braai while wearing ibheshu? How shallow.

With the president’s request that we mark the day by joining in the #JerusalemaChallenge (another thing that lockdown robbed us of, as we watched the rest of the world turn a South African artist’s song into a global dancing video megahit on a scale not seen since Gangnam Style eight years ago), it would be easy to sneer even more at what this holiday has evolved into.

Of course it is a good idea that we show our support to Master KG, an artist who, were it not for the pandemic, would probably have spent the year coining it in Europe and dancing on Ellen, but this is just further evidence that we really don’t know what to do with Heritage Day.

Surgery

But perhaps I am looking at it all wrong: maybe not all of our public holidays should be burdened with depth and meaning.

Maybe advertisers do have a point — even if it’s for their own benefit rather than our own. Maybe we should just spend the day partying, watching sports — and dancing to Jerusalema.

Perhaps, in its own extremely shallow way, that’s the healthiest solution for nation-building.

Maybe putting a bandage on something that needs surgery is our heritage, and Grumpy Gugus like me just need to fake it like everyone else.