Our Heritage Month has just begun. Accordingly, many of us will be involved in many activities to celebrate our common heritage throughout the month, and not just on 24 September, Heritage Day. For the month, our government has put forward the theme - "Celebrating our Living Heritage ('What we Live ') in the Tenth Year of our Democracy."
Our Department of Arts and Culture says that our living heritage consists of all the objects and practices that "communities, groups, and in some cases, individuals recognise as part of their cultural heritage, transmitted from generation to generation, (which) is constantly recreated by communities and groups in response to their environment, their interaction with nature and their history, and provides them with a sense of identity and continuity, thus promoting respect for cultural diversity and human creativity."
The Department says that it wants us to use Heritage Month "as a vehicle for a long-term vision of collecting, preserving, protecting, promoting and disseminating living heritage". Hopefully, as many of our people as possible will participate in this process that is central to the success of our continuing effort to give birth to a new and humane society, one of whose critical elements is our diverse and common "sense of identity and continuity".
Perhaps many of us do not have the time to reflect on these matters, which UNESCO refers to as the "intangible cultural heritage". There are many tangible problems and challenges to which all of us have to respond, daily, arising out of the stubborn legacy of colonialism and racism. In this situation, it may indeed be difficult to focus on what is described as "intangible".
However, difficult as it may be, we have to grapple with the intangible. The objective of a better life for all does not only refer to the material. It also encompasses the spiritual, the intangible.
More than four decades ago now, in 1962, the African American novelist, playwright, poet and essayist, James Baldwin, published the book of essays entitled, "Nobody Knows My Name". That simple title communicated the deeply painful message of loss of identity and continuity, of the reduction of a human being into a thing without a soul.
It immediately brought to mind the dehumanisation of James Baldwin's forebears, the Africans transported as slaves to the United States. As they lost their freedom, they also lost their names. Given other and alien names by the slave masters, they ceased to be who they had been, and were. They became the new sub-humans defined by the slave owners.
As we imagine them silently recalling who they really were, fearful of telling those who owned them as productive property what their real names were, we can almost hear them saying - nobody knows my name!
The fact of slavery and the intolerable agony they had to endure as slaves, were the tangible realities with which they had to contend every day of their short lives. Those who observed them from afar, with no knowledge of what it meant to be a slave, cruelly torn away from your family, your people and your native land, would have thought that for the slaves to weep bitter tears as they silently told themselves - nobody knows my name! - would have been the most irrational indulgence.
And yet in their intangible creations, their songs, the slaves sought death rather than a longer life characterised by slave labour and the denial of their identity as fully human persons. In their 'negro spirituals', they prayed for the speedy advent of the day when they would go to heaven, where they would be human again.
One of these spirituals, "Nobody knows who I am", says:
"O, nobody knows who I am, a-who I am,
Till the Judgement morning
Heaven bells a-ringing, the saints all singing
Heaven bells a-ringing in my soul
Want to go to Heaven
Want to go right
Want to go to Heaven
All dressed in white.
O, nobody knows who I am, a-who I am,
Till the Judgement morning
Heaven bells a-ringing, the saints all singing
Heaven bells a-ringing in my soul
If you don't believe
That I've been redeemed
Follow me down
To Jordan's stream."
The spiritual "Oh Freedom" is perhaps even more direct.
"Oh freedom
Oh freedom
Oh freedom over me!
And before I'd be a slave
I'll be buried in my grave
And go home to my Lord and be free.
No more moaning
No more moaning
No more moaning over me!
And before.
There'll be singing.
There'll be shouting.
There'll be praying."
The slaves prayed for Judgement morning, when they would be redeemed, when they would be free and home again, with Heaven's sacred bells ringing in the souls of those who, on earth, had been treated as nothing more than soulless and disposable beasts of burden.
Born in 1891, the African American, Claude McKay, was one of the poets, with Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes and others, whose writings gave birth to the period of the flowering of African American creativity described as "the Harlem Renaissance".
Fortunate to have been born after the emancipation of the slaves and the aftermath of the birth of the Pan African Movement led by W.E.B. du Bois and others, Claude McKay could refer elsewhere other than the grave and heaven, to reclaim his sense of identity and continuity.
To repossess this intangible right, he composed the poem entitled "The Tropics in New York", which reads:
"Bananas ripe and green, and ginger-root,
Cocoa in pods and alligator pears,
And tangerines and mangoes and grapefruit,
Fit for the highest prize at parish fairs,
Set in the window, bringing memories
Of fruit-trees laden by low-singing rills,
And dewy dawns, and mystical blue skies
In benediction over nun-like hills.
My eyes grew dim and I could no more gaze;
A wave of longing through my body swept,
And, hungry for the old, familiar ways,
I turned aside and bowed my head and wept."
The sight of tropical African fruits in the shops of New York had reawakened in Claude McKay an innate and unquenchable hunger to return to his roots, to be African and human again. An instinctive and long-dormant physical longing to return to the native land of his ancestors rocked his soul, evoking tears of misery that he could not return to the old, familiar ways he carried in his genes, in which he would have no cause to cry out - nobody knows my name!
As African South Africans we have, perhaps, not known as much pain as was borne by the fellow Africans who were transported across the Atlantic Ocean to serve the New World as slaves. Certainly, the sight of tropical fruits in our supermarkets has never reawakened in us suppressed memories of a continent to which we once belonged. The pain imposed on us by racism has never forced us to think that death was preferable to life.
But we too have had to contend with an historical reality that deliberately sought to deprive us of our sense of identity and continuity. Colonial and apartheid oppression sought to rob us of our "cultural heritage, transmitted from generation to generation, (which) is constantly recreated by communities and groups in response to their environment, their interaction with nature and their history".
Deliberately, this racist system sought to destroy everything that would give the indigenous majority a sense of identity and continuity. This entailed not only the military defeat of this majority and its political subjugation.
It also meant the total transformation of the life conditions that would give the African majority the possibility to maintain its identity and its living heritage. The Africans lost their land and therefore the possibility for an independent economic existence. But this also meant the virtual loss of the intangibles, of such cultural norms as communal life, human solidarity and ubuntu, which were the non-material expression of the material conditions of pre-colonial society.
Our "interaction with nature and history" meant that our living heritage had to bend to the dictates of the dominant social order, which, among other things, celebrated an intensely acquisitive individualism. Based essentially on the values of social and community cohesion, it had to find its place within a society on which the ruling group had imposed the social norm -everyone for himself or herself, and the devil take the hindmost!
Our living heritage would find great affinity with the sentiment expressed by the British historian, R.H. Tawney, when he wrote in his book "The acquisitive society" that, "the heart of the problem is not economic. It is a question of moral relationships. This is the citadel that must be attacked.the immoral, self-seeking philosophy which underlies much of modern society."
Today, and as part of our struggle to build a moral and people-centred society, our country is preoccupied with the challenge of what Nelson Mandela once described as "the RDP of the soul". We are correctly concerned about issues of moral regeneration and a new patriotism. We are proud to say that we are "proudly South African".
All this has to do with the living, intangible heritage for whose preservation, protection, promotion and dissemination, we will seek to use Heritage Month. It should therefore be clear that the fact that it is 'intangible' does not mean that it is unimportant.
It has to do with an age when we too had occasion to say - nobody knows my name. For colonialism and apartheid also deliberately sought to negate our cultural heritage, to deny us our own sense of identity and continuity. In the process our own masters tried to take away our names. Kopano became Jane, and Sipho, Jim. Thus renamed, they sought to use us as putty in their hands, to model and redefine us, so that we would take it as an expression of the will of God, that we should forever do their bidding, as their willing and mindless instruments.
Because the intangible mattered to the oppressed, the ordinary working people responded in their own way to the attempt to deprive them of their identity. As they engaged in hard labour, under the watchful eyes of the white overseers, they chanted - "abelungu ngoodamn; basibiza ooJim." These rhymes, with their rhythm, have also become part of our living heritage, an example of the process of the re-creation of our intangible heritage in response to our social environment.
For many centuries racism has been a defining feature of our society. There are some in our country who find it to their material advantage that all of us should ignore the stark reality that this has left us with a deeply entrenched legacy of racial divisions and inequalities. But this reality is also directly relevant to what we will be doing during Heritage Month and subsequently, to assert our diverse identities, while also promoting our unity, as well as respect for our cultural diversity and the creativity of all our people.
In his book, "Nobody Knows My Name", James Baldwin also wrote about the impact of a long history of racism on his own country, the United States. A creative and sensitive thinker and writer, he knew that what he cared most about, the intangible cultural heritage of his people and country, had to contend with, and thrive within the context of that long history.
And so he confronted the matter directly, refusing to draw comfort from the promise of a better life in heaven, reluctant to still the demons by hoping for his return to Africa, as we should be reluctant to still the demons by a casual reference to a Rainbow Nation. Telling a story about himself, he wrote that "the political and spiritual currents of my very early youth involved a return to Africa, or a rejection of it; either choice would lead to suicide, or madness, for, in fact, neither choice was possible."
James Baldwin also wrote: "The reason that it is important - of the utmost importance - for white people, here, to see the Negroes as people like themselves is that white people will not, otherwise, be able to see themselves as they are. . . And this long history of moral evasion has had an unhealthy effect on the total life of the country."
During our Heritage Month, we must all see all our people as people like ourselves. And thus each one of us as national groups will be able to see ourselves as we are. By freeing ourselves of the burdens of prejudice, enabling ourselves to celebrate our diverse living heritage, we will achieve what James Baldwin called "the act of assuming and becoming oneself", no longer denied the right to call ourselves by our own names.
