I want to acknowledge our poets who are here. I cannot give James Mathews a higher acknowledgement than what the President has given him. He is part of that great conveyer belt of poets, of artists that the Western Cape is producing.
I want to say to all of you who have come here thank you very much for coming to spend heritage day with us. I must say that I was very disappointed when I heard that there are people who have decided that they are going to turn Heritage Day into National Braai Day. I do not have anything against braais but when you take an important day such as Heritage Day and turn it into a National Braai Day, then there is something wrong. Then I think we are not using the opportunity to pay respect to those who have been the architects of this diversity that we have and the unity that we need to forge.
We have to remember people such as Amy Biehl, who came from America and lost her life in South Africa for a cause that we all understood. Here was the Gugulethu 7, young people who gave up their lives so that our children today can be free. The people to whom our poet James Mathews has paid tribute to such as Steve Biko and others.
They died before they could taste the freedom that we are enjoying today. So the question we must ask ourselves is: can we squander? Can we waste? Can we be less free with this freedom we have? With this democracy that we have, when others have died before they saw it as a reality? Oliver Thambo, one of the greatest leaders that the African National Congress has produced, was on the threshold of the promise land when his life was ended.
Chief Albert Lithuli, another President of the African National Congress, in 1961, when he saw his Comrades such as former President Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu go to Robben Island and Oliver Thambo go into exile. He saw the people killed in Sharpville and yet when he was asked: what is your vision of South Africa? He said: that South Africa will be a home for all. He was echoing the freedom charter which said: South Africa belongs to all who live in it, Black and White. That is our heritage. A heritage of great generosity. Even to those who oppressed us. Chief Luthuli could have said, get rid of the Whites because they killed our people in Sharpville. Chief Luthuli could have said: get rid of the Whites because they sent Nelson Mandela to jail and Oliver Tambo into exile.
Yet Chief Luthuli had the generosity of spirit to say: Let us make this country a home for all, let it be a place all of us can live in together. That is why on an occasion such as Heritage Day, we must enjoy ourselves, but we must have those moments when we sit down quietly, when we think about where we come from, when we give thanks for where we are, where we commit ourselves to attain the rest of the freedom that we must still go and fetch which is not with us today.
People who forget their heroes will soon lose themselves, a people who forget who and where they come from will not know where they are going to. As the national government has called us, let us celebrate our poetry. So we call together our poets today, and we say to them; share with us your poetry, not only because it is beautiful to the ear, but because it tells our story, because it reminds us of who we are as people. It tells us when we are different and when we are the same.
You see, in South Africa, we have a unique right that comes from our constitution. The right in the first place is to be different. There is nothing wrong with someone speaking xhosa, afrikaans or english in the Western Cape. We have the right to be different and to speak our languages. There is nothing wrong with someone worshiping in a church, with someone worshiping in the mosque and someone else worshiping in the synagogue or in a temple. We have the right to worship differently.
There is nothing wrong with someone having a white skin, another a brown skin and someone else a black skin. We have the right to be different because that is given to us by God. We have the right to eat different foods, someone may want curry, someone may want fish and chips, someone may want pap and wors. We have the right to eat different things. We have the right to drink different things, some of us can drink alcohol, and some of us cannot drink alcohol. But we have the right to be different.
But today it was a day when I would have thought that all our communities would respond to the call, to celebrate our poetry. Here was the opportunity for that history of afrikaans poetry to come forward and maybe to find in each other. Could we have combined the poetry of Adam Small with the poetry of Eugene Murray? Could we have thought whether Eugene Murray or another White Afrikaans poet could have written about the Anglo Boer War, but he could have spoken about the same freedom that we want, only he wants for his own people and not for all people. Could we have reconciled all of those poems? Could we have brought together the poetry that comes from the communities in the Western Cape when they saw the Khoi and the San being killed, when they saw the destruction of someone such as Sarah Baartman, her humiliation or when they witnessed the destruction of the Khoi and the San language and the slavery of our people?
It may have been the same call that came out from the poetry of the Eastern Cape when the Xhosa tribes were facing one way of colonialism after the other at the Fish River, the Kei River and all the other places where the heroic battles were fought. We may have spoken about different places, one in the Western Cape and one in the Eastern Cape, different people, some with the light skin in the Western Cape, some with the darker skins in the Eastern Cape, speaking different languages, the Khoi and the san language here and the xhosa language in the Eastern Cape. But we may have spoken about the same desire for freedom, the same desire for equality, the same desire to be human and the same desire to belong and not to be dispossessed in this country.
Why is it that communities do not grab the opportunity to tell that story, to reconcile all our stories and to say, that maybe the human condition is the same, the human yearning for freedom is the same, the human yearning for equality is the same, the human yearning for dignity is the same, maybe we could have discovered each other in that way, but yet, there are some of us who try to celebrate only in our own corners, in our own group areas in our own home lands in the new South Africa. There are mental and psychological home lands, mental and psychological group areas, mental and psychological corners in which we want to celebrate.
We want to come together under the banner of separate organizations, and then we want to have a torch light and then we want to have a night dedicated to one poem or one poet. I think what South Africa requires is not to lose the diverse heritage of poetry, but to find more opportunities for all poets to come together to exchange poetry, to argue and debate amongst each other for meaning and to come to a conclusion about why our poetry is diverse. The human meaning may be the same. That is why we may have spoken about freedom. For some, the time now is to speak of freedom for all. We must find equality amongst all people.
I think that it is a missed opportunity that not too many communities have come to say this is our poetry, we want to add it to the overall poetry that exists in South Africa. We want to make this our contribution to this home for all so that we can be different but we can also be united with everyone else.
There is no reason for us in the Western Cape to remain separate and divided, calling each other all kinds of derogatory names. I think that we must use this heritage day to say that we no longer want our White communities to retire behind the big walls with alarm systems and security companies on stand by. We have to be able to say: for you, the Western Cape must be a home for all, join the home for all and let us build it together.
No longer must we have a situation where so called coloured communities are insecure, believing that they are not black enough and they are not white enough, not knowing where they belong or what their identity is. We must say to them, your identity can only be defined when you reach out to others, Black on the one side, Whites on the other side and see who you are, believe who you are and understand that you do not have to be White or you do not have to be Black, you only have to be human and you only have to reach out to others, and you only have to be living your own equality. Die Wes Kaap is 'n tuiste vir almal.
We must say, as we are saying to Gugulethu today, that we know that this Western Cape has been particularly unfriendly to African people. We know that this Western Cape has been a place where Xhosa speaking people were not allowed to come in unless they had a job. That if the husband had a job the wife has to stay with the children in the home lands. We know that, that when families wanted to be joined together here in Cape Town, they were bulldozed at Cross Roads, bulldozed at KTC and bulldozed wherever they put up their homes. We know that, that is the history. We know that apartheid has tried to create conflict particularly between African and Coloured by making Coloureds the supervisor and African the laborer. We know that, that has worked. We know that we call each other bad names, kaffirs, boere and hotnots.
Today we must say on Heritage Day, Intshona Koloni ikhaya lethu sonke. It may be that the politicians may not be able to succeed completely in building this unity, we know as the elections come closer, then people are of the opinion that everything that politicians say, is for votes. I think that if we want the Western Cape to be a home for all, if we want our people to be united, if we want our communities to come together, if we want every citizen to claim their citizenship in the Western Cape, then maybe we must ask as we start to ask today Minister Jacobs, maybe we must ask our poets, can you pick up where we are not able to do it?
We cannot afford for our wisdom to retire, we cannot afford for our artists to stand back, we cannot afford any of our musicians to not sing the songs of unity and sing the songs that challenge us as we go forward. We need a vibrant debate and it cannot only be a debate of pro's. It cannot only be a debate of government speakers, it has to be a debate where the poets join us again and protest against the divisions, protest against disunity and protest against the difficult things in our society.
We need your voice again and we need you to come forward because we do not have all the wisdom to take this forward. I think that we are shaking the era of our poets once again, to speak to us from the depths of their soul and to be in our conscious all the time because if they do not do it, no one else will.
Our children are losing their heritage, they are the victims of MTV and of Hollywood. They are the victims of single forms of music, they are the victims of single forms of genres and we need you to remind us that our richness cannot be sacrificed on the altar of Hollywood or MTV. We have our own music, we have our own drama, we have our own poetry, we have our own art. We cannot Americanize the whole world. We cannot make the whole world uniform. We are losing our heritage, and our children are becoming more Americanized rather than being proud Africans. We must push back the American way of making culture uniform across the world, making it the common denominator amongst all people.
If our children are going to be proud of who they are, they must be proud of who their parents are and who thier grand parents and previous generations were. That is the story that only our poets can tell. Happy heritage day, enjoy it and may we remember all of those who have sacrificed so that we can be free. Let us call upon our poets to take their rightful place and speak to our consciousness because we do not have all the answers that our country needs in order to make this place we live in a home for all.
Thank you very much.
