Heritage Day is more than a public holiday — it’s a time to connect, braai, and celebrate our diverse South African culture.
Hurray, it’s Braai Day tomorrow!
It’s Heritage Day, but that quickly became transmogrified into something that is a bit tongue in cheek, yet far more relevant and inclusive for that.
Of course, the Mother Grundies didn’t like it, but not everything about us must be desperately serious and grim – there is more than enough opportunity across the 12 public holidays that we must be appropriately sombre and reflective of where we have come from and where we are going.
Most of us, irrespective of the languages we speak, enjoy spending time outdoors and cooking – and for those that don’t like meat, there’s nothing better than a lekker big mushroom smothered with garlic butter over the open flames, or a braaibroodjie.
But there’s another thing, at different times of our history integration has seemed counter-intuitive.
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The scars of segregation and forced removals are writ large, the open wounds still suppurate in the minds of many.
And yet, it’s amazing how we are one people; one society.
It doesn’t seem so, but have you ever thought how, except for anally retentive Karens and some bourgeois little Englanders who will also be Mr and Mrs X, we call one another boetie, bhuti, brother, swaer, s’bale or sister, sis’yami, sissie?
The elders and white beards among us are oom, tannie, malume, mama, ntate, mkhulu and tata.
It doesn’t just happen around the braai, it’s how we address one another by second nature. What a privilege to be regarded as someone’s brother, or their father, or grandfather – and inherently respected as such.
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What a wonderful society to be included in a world where exclusion was the norm and in a country where we once defined a name for an entire system to keep people apart.
Well done to the supermarkets and butchers for encouraging us to get out and light the fires tomorrow and put the world to rights around the braai or the chesa nyama, but never the barbecue.
Well done to the government for giving us this day and well done to all the companies who will hose those schmaltzy in-house cometo-Jesus events with everyone dressing up in khakis, doeks and springbok fur to revel in their own heritage under the umbrella of one sense of nationhood.
When you come to think of it, this might be most important public holiday of all.
Enjoy Heritage Day!
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