Disunity now marks Heritage Day

Many South Africans, being South Africans, spent yesterday doing as little as possible, eating as much as possible and trying to get as drunk as possible.

Few of them would have given a second thought to their heritage on Heritage Day.

Partly that’s because the one thing which unites South Africans – across race, gender and religion – is the opportunity to have a day off. And many of the commemorative national holidays are treated simply as that – a chance to put the feet up and relax … or party.

But, more ominously, Heritage Day has lost most of the power it was originally intended to have, back in the rose-tinted glow of the Mandela era, when many South Africans believed the illusion that they were, to appropriate the words of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, “the Rainbow Nation”.

The hope, then, was that Heritage Day would serve to remind South Africans of where they had come from … but as an even more important reminder of where they were going: towards a united country.

In 2018, those sentiments look naive.

The failure of the ANC government to tackle the deep-rooted inequalities in society, coupled with the failure of many to genuinely embrace nonracialism, has seen a widening of the gulf between races. Issues that should have been tackled years ago – such as the restitution of land – are only being tackled now, long after attitudes have hardened and anger has risen.

We wonder if the starry-eyed optimism of the years after 1994 didn’t do this country a grave disservice by postponing the real debates and the traumatic changes to society which needed to happen.

Today, something like Heritage Day, when it is recognised by South Africans, emphasises our differences, rather than smoothing them out.

We need to ask seriously: do South Africans really need a holiday like this?

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