People who have forgotten where they come from have nothing to contribute to South Africa. People who have given up their roots, have nothing to give to South Africa, people who turn their on heritage, have nothing to contribute to South Africa.
The struggle that we have in South Africa is for us at the same time to be different. But that is not the contradiction, how can you be the same and be different. We are the same, when you stand up here as was illustrated and we say, I am an African, we are not Asians, we are not Europeans, we are not Americans, we are Africans, and in that respect, all of us are the same.
We are the same when we say we are South Africans and we are proud to be the generations that have been set free by Nelson Mandela and all the other leaders. We are South Africans, whichever colour we are, whichever language we speak, we are the same.
We are the same when we say we are citizens of the Western Cape and when we say more importantly, that this Western Cape is a home for all, 'n tuiste vir almal, ikhaya lethu sonke. That is very important because we know our histories are separate, our histories are divided, our histories have taught us to despise each other, to hate each other's differences, to look down on each other, to discriminate on each other. That is the history of colonialism and that is the history of apartheid.
But more than hating each other's culture, its other's language and disliking each other's customs and rituals and not respecting it, our history has also been one in which many of us were taught to turn our back on our own heritage, we were made ashamed of our own heritage, when we dress in Xhosa traditional dress, we were even made to hate our history because the history books only taught us that our own was a savage history.
When we put on the clothes of the minstrels and play their instruments, we were taught to despise it because they were called fools, as if that singing on new year's eve had no meaning in our lives. We were made to forget that the tradition of being proudly Xhosa, came out of a proud struggle, one battle after the other to resist colonialism, that it takes the sacrifice of thousands and thousands of warriors as they resisted at the Fish river, at the Kei river and every other river that became the battle field to resist colonialism. We were made to feel ashamed of that entire history as if it was all savage.
We forget that the history of the mistrals was a celebration of the freeing of slaves, that when slaves were freed, people broke into songs of freedom, and we were made to forget it and despise it in much the same way. We can go to every culture and show how we were made to turn our back on our own heritage and traditions. What we are saying, on this Heritage Day is that all of us must reclaim that history, that heritage and be proud of where we come from. Because the point of apartheid is not just that it separated people, Blacks on that side, Whites on that side, Coloreds on that side, Indians on that side. It was not just that it made rivals between languages, Xhosa, English, Afrikaans in the Western Cape. It was not just that it put us in separate areas and separate schools, that it dispossessed us, took away our land, took away our jobs, took away our wealth. If apartheid had done only that, then we could have overcome it through money and through laws.
What apartheid did, was to rob us, of our self confidence, of our self esteem, our self worth, to make us despise ourselves. You cannot be told for 300 years that you are no good, that you are second class, that you are third class citizens, that you are only good to be people who can work in the mines, people who can work with their hands, people who must carry water to others and serve others. You cannot be told these untruths for 300 years and on the day that Dr. Nelson Mandela becomes president, we are a confident nation with confident individuals who know who they are, who know where they come from and who know where they are going to.
So, Heritage Day is a day in which we call to mind, where we come from last year, when we celebrated Heritage Day, each community was forced to go back and look at the music, to see what musical instruments they were playing, to go and learn again the songs that kept them alive, that carried their values, that carried their culture.
This year as Minister Jacobs said, the theme is poetry because each one of us have deep traditions of poetry, that carry our values that carry our messages, that carry our traditions and that carry our culture. We have to go back to that poetry and those rich traditions and see what meaning they have for us today.
We have to go back to the rich tradition of Xhosa poetry that speaks of the battles that were fought, the sacrifices that were made, the dispossession of the land that was experienced, the changing of life from a rural village to the mines of Johannesburg, which speaks of separations of families as the men went to the mines and women stayed in the compounds or stayed in the home lands.
We have to go back and fetch that tradition, we have to go back and fetch the rich tradition that the Malays brought with them and make this part of the South African heritage. We must not let anyone take any part of our culture away from us. We have to claim it as the common property of all Africans and all South Africans. Unless we know where we come from, we will not know where we are going to. That is why the Western Cape is facing all these difficulties that we are facing today.
We divide very easily, we call each other bad names very easily. Malayers, Kaffirs, Hotnots, Boere. It is because we are uncomfortable with each other. We are not comfortable with ourselves so we have to push someone else down. Because I do not know my own heritage as a Coloured, I can only put forward my superiority by re-insulting someone who is darker in colour than me because there are other problems in life. Because I do not have the skills, I can only blame someone with the lighter colour that me.
How do we overcome these things where we become confident in ourselves as citizens of the Western Cape where we can truly call this Western Cape a home for all? The starting point, is Heritage Day. Go back into your own history, do not be ashamed of your history, reclaim your own culture. If Bantu education distorted Xhosa culture or Sotho culture or whatever culture, take it away from Bantu education, bring I back, put it through a reforms process and make sure that we get our own poems back into society, so that we can understand where we come from. In much of the Afrikaans poetry, for example, there are lessons to be learned, even about how Afrikaaners had to break free from English colonialism and fetch a new world for themselves in South Africa even if it was at the expense of Black people, there are certain things that we can learn from it, we cannot leave it to one community to interpret it.
So if the Western Cape is truly going to become a home for all, then it does not mean only about living now or going forward because sometimes when we are too eager to go into the future we must ask what are we hiding in our past? We have to be able to say let us go back to our heritage because there are resources in our heritage that we must carry forward.
Particularly, our teachers, our managers of education, our officials in Education Department, your job is more than to get through a syllabus, more that to supervise the education of our children more than the results that must come at the end of the year. You have the responsibility to build whole people, people in touch with their past who are confident about their future, that is your job. We can sort out some of the A's, or B's or C's, not lower than that, we can sort out some of those things but if you have produced an A, but you have brought us a distorted person who is ashamed of the past and not confident about the future, then the education system has not succeeded. If you bring us people who scored A in Maths and Science but they are not confident about the future and they blame other people, then you have not succeeded in educating people properly.
What we have seen here is not a fusion, you have not seen an assimilation of Malay, Coloured, Xhosa, Indian culture. No one hid their culture from us, each one was who they were, but they were able to put it together in a way that showed us the potential of this Western Cape. We must not be ashamed of our slave history, we must infact, speak to the history of the Khoi and the San in the Western Cape. These are some of the people whom we hide from our history books.
If the South African government did not put their language as the motto of our country, we would not have respected that language. So we need to be able to face these truths, not in hatred and bitterness in each other, but in honesty and in reconciliation towards each other. I think we have to be able to use heritage today to forge a new future but drawing from the past because the past is rich, it is our entire history, it is our entire value system that is there.
The greatest danger we face today in terms of our cultures and our heritage is globalization. We will forget all the songs, all these music and all these poetry and remember Hollywood and MTV. This form of music is taking over our children, it is making our children think that they are only 'cool' when they imitate Kanye West and other pop stars. That you are only 'cool' when you can rap and forget the poetry of your own people. You are only 'cool' when you can act with half of your clothes on rather than the kind of drama that comes from our own communities.
Beacause of this reality, we have to make concerted efforts to teach our children where they come from, otherwise ,we are South Africans reading Americans. Otherwise, we are Africans preparing people for the future in the West, not proud of who they are, but always looking for the opportunities that Hollywood put into their minds. I am not against America, I am not against Hollywood, I am calling out parents and teachers to immunise our children against Hollywood and the americanization of all our cultures. These are the things we have to watch out for.
To end up, I want to thank everyone, particularly Minister Dugmore and Education Department that have put together this programme, I think it is a wonderful way to enter a long weekend for Heritage Day, I am sure that when Minister Jacobs runs our heritage day on Monday, that we will be able to say we saw something today in the Gugulethu Sports Centre that will remain with us forever. The sight of our young children knowing who they are and their confidence in knowing where they are going to, that is the best we can do in education.
