ADDRESS BY PREMIER TSP MAKWETLA AT THE HERITAGE CELEBRATIONS
Kriel Sports Grounds
Thursday 24 September 2004
Programme Directors
MEC Siphosezwe Masango and Ms Dinah Pule
Members of the Provincial Executive Council
and the Mpumalanga Legislature
Executive Mayor Councillor SPD Skhosana
Mayors and Councillors present here today
Ladies and gentlemen
September is a special month. It is during this time that nature sheds the old and clads itself with a new coat, symbolising a fresh start after the drab winter months. And almost in tandem with nature, we gather here today to pause and renew our commitment to and rededicate ourselves to those things that makes us who we truly are - proud South Africans. People who are prepared to do extra-ordinary things to create that better and humane future we desire for all our people.
We have just emerged from a past where some people denied that the majority of our people had any history, culture, belief or value system of their own. The culture of the majority of our people was neglected, distorted and suppressed. Freedom of expression and creativity were stifled. People and communities were denied access to resources and facilities to exercise and develop their need for cultural and artistic expression. Illiteracy, the lack of an effective educational system, and extreme poverty compounded this cultural deprivation.
There are still many among us who truly believe that heritage involves only language, custom, culture and the arts. That is why they believe that National Heritage Day should focus us on these areas in all their diversity, recognising the reality that this diversity is but a combination of different colours and materials that bind together to form a single quilt. They therefore expect that on this day we should only celebrate the varied complexity of the music and dance, the drama, the poetry, the languages and so forth.
Our living heritage consists of all the objects and practices that communities and groups recognise as part of their cultural heritage, transmitted from generation to generation. Our living heritage ranges from oral traditions, oral histories, rituals, indigenous knowledge systems that have been preserved; that have undergone changes and thus have removed or added some new dimensions due to constant interaction among the various communities of the world that originally were separated by space and time distances.
This interaction has further been enhanced by global cosmopolitanism that has
been brought about by the advent of telecommunications, increased travel and
tourism and thus reducing the distance of time and space among various
communities.
Living heritage, like any other human activity, emanates from time immemorial. It is a lived experience of the various communities. It is a totality of their experiences; the manner in which they deal with birth, the coming of age, maturity, marriage, old age and death; the manner in which they celebrate theses stages of human development; the manner in which they deal with poverty and destitution, how they build their economies, how they create their stability; how they co-exist with other communities as well as their natural environment, how they narrate their stories, how they sing and dance.
At the same time, some take it as given that National Heritage Day gives us the possibility, and impose an obligation on us, to celebrate particular moments of frozen historic time that we see as inherent to the determination of who and what we are.
Today as we celebrate National Heritage Day, we have to recognise the fact this year's theme: "Celebrating our Living Heritage in the Tenth Year of Our Democracy," drives home the message that for the past decade we have been consciously forging a new nation that is as much a united nation as it is diverse.
Programme Director, at the same time we must accept that while there are those aspects of our inherited culture that really make us who we are, some of that heritage is not worthy of celebration.
The unacceptable elements of our culture that we have inherited constitute part of what we need to confront as we continue the struggle for the fundamental social transformation of our country. Our heritage is therefore not only about language, music and dance. It also concerns the political, economic and social history that also defines who and what we are.
Today we gather in the town of Kriel, a place that powers a large portion of South Africa's economy, to once again proclaim that nowhere in history has might eternally triumphed over right. Today we owe our freedom to those who despite suffering the indignity of having their land taken away from them, being denied their freedom and reduced to mere hewers of wood and bearers of water, sought to throw off the shackles and build a truly united country. To create that truly prosperous people-centred society of freedom and democracy, non-racism and non-sexism.
What we have inherited as a country, provides us with an even firmer foundation on which to base our definition of ourselves as human beings. It is important that 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 must believe this to be true that there will come a time when those cultures which some people described as barbaric, will be accepted by all of us as part of the tapestry that builds South African culture. We must believe this to be true that by sharing with other South Africans what they believe to be sacred to themselves, all Afrikaners will come to understand that they are, indeed, Africans, and can be nothing else.
We must understand that as born or naturalised South Africans; whether we are
Portuguese or Pedi, Tswana or Tamil, Swazi or Scottish, Ndebele or Nyanja, Zulu
or Zanzibari, Afrikaner or Angola, if we have accepted South Africa as our home
and country to which we owe allegiance, all have a right to claim and celebrate
their languages and their cultures as part of the national heritage. On National
Heritage Day, one and all have a right to take to our assembly places, our
fields and our streets, to enhance our unity as a people by celebrating our
diversity, with none superior to the other, with none entitled to be more human
than another.
For the past decade as government and as the people of Mpumalanga and South Africa, we have taken a deliberate decision to affirm and promote the rich and diverse expression of South African culture. We are constantly striving for a country where all people must be guaranteed the right to practice their culture, language, beliefs and customs as well as enjoy freedom of expression and creativity free from interference
As government we believe that it is possible for all population groups to express and exhibit the rich and diverse cultural heritage of our Rainbow Nation. It is possible because we have as one of our ideals the creation of a non-racial, non-sexist, multilingual and multicultural society. We also believe that the sharing and mutual appreciation of cultural experiences among various communities that we shall achieve national reconciliation, nation building, and social cohesion.
Heritage Day gives us an opportunity to reflect upon and enjoy the rich and diverse heritage with which we are blessed. This heritage is an important part of what defines us as a country and a people, the starting point of our march towards the better and humane future we desire for all our people. Celebrate diversity. We who live today are privileged that we have the opportunity and the possibility to make of our country the happy home for all our diverse people that must surely be due to a land that is the cradle of humanity. Much of what we have inherited gives us the possibility to achieve this noble objective, working together as fellow South Africans, inspired by a new patriotism.
At the same time it offers us an opportunity to work harder and faster towards
the elimination of poverty and the opening of the doors of learning and culture
for the benefit of all our fellow countrymen and women. We must rid this
province and country of the poverty that both wastes people and denied them
their dignity and humanity.
We are still wedded to the ideal of creating a better life for all, while creating work and fighting unemployment and poverty. Our main challenge remains speeding up the creation of work and further strengthening the fight against poverty. That is why at the convocation of the present Legislature we emphasised at the we will radically reduce the levels of unemployment and poverty, by combining the resources of the public and private sectors and build an economy that benefits all.
We said then that while expanding our economic base, we will ensure that the
country's wealth, business opportunities, skills training and other
opportunities are more equitably shared by all our people, irrespective of race,
gender, disability and age differences.
The Expanded Public Works Programme, which we launched in Ntoane recently,
remains our key strategy to unlock the problem of joblessness in the province.
The EPWP will create work where the people are in order to simultaneously
reverse the family dislocation revisited on our people by the culture of migrant
labour.
We also promised to intensify our efforts to provide services and
opportunities such as water and sanitation, health, electricity, housing and
education to those people in Mpumalanga who still do not have them, while
speeding up the provision of housing, health-facilities, classrooms, water and
sanitation and electricity.
We have taken great strides in our efforts to do all these things and more,
including promoting nation building, democracy and economic development in the
province. For the past decade our celebrations have, and continue to add value
to our task of forging our nationhood, thus displaying to other nations of the
world, as well as to ourselves, our capacity to give humanity what is proudly
the product of the composite effort of all our people.
The challenges remain - but we remain confident that as a province we will succeed in our efforts to push back the frontiers of poverty and find solutions to the problems of unemployment, illiteracy and gender inequality.
May we all have a wonderful Heritage day.