This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

22nd September 2007

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Monday, 24th September 2007: another public holiday, another chance for South Africans to pursue their separate agendas. Politicians will take advantage of the feel-good factor, echoing a statement issued by the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology in 1996 claiming that the creation of Heritage Day would be “a powerful agent for promulgating a South African identity, fostering reconciliation and promoting the notion that variety is a national asset”. Some will be participating in National Braai Day. Some will be commemorating the day of King Shaka’s death in 1828.

For most South Africans, however, it will be a day for kicking back, relaxing and wondering exactly what it is that should be celebrated. This is not because there’s nothing to celebrate – on the contrary, as pointed out in the same 1996 statement, what “we” as a nation have inherited makes for an impressive list: “wild life and scenic parks, sites of scientific or historical importance, works of art, literature and music, oral traditions, museum collections”, as well as “language” and even “the food we eat” (so perhaps the braaiers aren’t too far off the mark after all).

The problem is that these are all, as the good folk at the DoACST acknowledged, “aspects of South African culture which are both tangible and difficult to pin down”. And South Africans are particularly fond of pinning things down. In our revisionist, post-apartheid approaches to history, we’ve become used to singling out goodies and baddies so that we can praise or condemn particular figures; likewise, during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, assigning the status of victim or perpetrator to those who participated made it easier to apportion blame, and therefore to forgive.

With other public holidays, it’s much easier. On June 16th, we remember that Hector Pieterson was a goodie, and the police were baddies. On December 16th, we remember that it used to be state policy to laud Piet Retief, but it’s now state policy to sympathise with Dingaan; or, to be less cynical, perhaps we should say that it used to be state policy to cherish a belligerent covenant, but it’s now state policy to eschew the inter-racial violence that brought about Blood River. Either interpretation provides useful symbols. In fact, all of our political public holidays relate to iconic portraits: queues snaking out of voting stations on 27th April, protestors being shot in the back on 21st March, women marching arm-in-arm on 9th August.

These are not bad things in themselves. But the vagueness that hangs over Heritage Day speaks to an over-dependence on symbolism in South Africa’s public life. Braai tongs flipping boerewors? King Shaka’s spear and shield? However emblematic these may be, neither can claim to represent South Africa’s heritage. Symbols are necessary – where would poets be without them? – but they have limited uses.

Indeed, they divide more often than they unite. Witness the ongoing disagreement over name changes across the country. Most recently, the opposing parties in the Tshwane debacle took up their cudgels once again, but this is a scenario that has played itself out frequently over the course of the year. Western Cape Premier Ebrahim Rasool’s campaign to “decolonise” Cape Town highlighted streets and public buildings named after unlikeable characters in South African history such as Oswald Pirow.

Rasool’s efforts to renew debates on how to solve the problem were creditable, but they weren’t helped by his advocacy of changing the name of Cape Town International Airport to honour the memory of little-known trade unionist James “Jimmy” La Guma (father of writer and, arguably, more significant activist Alex). I must, reluctantly, agree with Tony Leon on this one: it’s all very well to rename an airport after a giant like Oliver Tambo, but it would be folly to rename an airport after a relatively marginal and potentially divisive figure. What both Rasool and Leon forgot, however, is that it is always foolish to name anything after a politician, for political legacies are rarely permanent, and history turns almost all symbols upside-down.

Even authentic heroes lose some of their gloss through over-exposure, or through the taint of corrupt and inept successors. As part of Rasool’s campaign, the streets of Cape Town were lined with posters showing the names and faces of local figures who offered considerable resistance to apartheid in their time. This was a fair educational initiative, especially as it built awareness of the contribution of those who are not on the struggle celebrity A-list: it’s a good thing if names like Molly Blackburn are circulated in public discourse. But an over-emphasis on the symbolic past can often indicate that there is little worthy of celebration in the pragmatic present. The icons of the struggle might be big chips to cash in, but their successors can’t lay any further claim to those kudos.

Relishing the pride evoked by representative individuals is a dangerous weakness, as it allows those in power (or those desiring power) to blind us to all manner of present sins by deflecting the light of past achievements – usually others’ achievements – into our eyes. Consider the memorial service for Adelaide Tambo earlier this year, when the rites of mourning over her death were seized upon by the ANC as a self-congratulatory political marketing opportunity.

That was not the first time that the passing of a struggle veteran had been abused in this way; worse, however, was the fact that her memorial service became a vehicle for contemporary political tensions. Was Alan Boesak prevented from preaching? Was he asked to sit with the VIP guests to pacify his fragile ego? Did it actually matter? The man is a fraud and a hypocrite, and his situation hardly warranted the attention given to it in the Cape press, but again, we couldn’t help ourselves. Our Reality TV/gossip column-infused version of politics places so much stress on personality that, in our obsession with symbolic heroes and villains, we become inordinately fascinated by those (and let’s be honest, there are lots of them nowadays) straddling the two categories: the “fallen heroes”.

Often enough, these controversial public figures are rather grandiose in their words and actions, having mastered the art of representation: Tony Yengeni performing a ritual bull-killing, Jacob Zuma’s umshini wam’ (emblematic of we-all-know-what), even Adriaan Vlok, performing the symbolic act of washing his victims’ feet.

It is unfortunate, but nevertheless to be expected, that the media spectacle of the twenty-first century complements the age-old preference that politicians have for an excess of show and a dearth of substance. For all his faults, Thabo Mbeki’s rather stolid public persona is rather pleasing in this light. But what about his audience – the nation whose state he annually describes amidst the pomp and ceremony of the opening of parliament? And wasn’t he criticised, as usual, for lacking “charisma” in his speech?

All this suggests an unhealthy predisposition towards the symbolic in the South African public sphere: a national fondness for that form of symbolism in which meaning is attached to the superficial rather than the substantial, to the abstract rather than the actual. If so, that is not a heritage to be proud of.