While eParkeni figured this as just a8nother public holiday, pops up a woman, plump cheekbones, generally stunning and all beautifully kitted out in traditional Xhosa regalia.
May we take a picture?
Sure, as long as you include my friend.
Suddenly, a story presents itself on this day when the traditional paraphernalia has been excavated from the wardrobe and many suip over the braaistand. When the potjiekos is simmering on the cast iron and the calabash (really a customized 5lt tin) of umqombothi is being passed around amongst huddles of men and women bent on celebrating the ancient ways of their genealogy.
The runways of Paris may be famously fashionable platforms, but here on 27 September is where a simpler but exquisite form of beauty saunters down the streets. Matching two pieces and frill dresses, doeks and wrist bands and slippers made from goatskin.
But is that all there is to it? Dop and a braai? A colourful ensemble? An offering of blood to the ancestors? Rising up early to lay a wreath on the grave of an elder long gone? Not so long ago the writer Zakes Mda tweeted something interesting: ‘Every Heritage Day we hear a call that customs and traditions must be restored. For me it really depends which customs and traditions.’ The Heart of Redness author goes on, ‘I agree with composer Gustav Mahler when he says: ”Tradition is not the worship of ashes but the preservation of fire.”
To the ponderous Mda, heritage is less a static traditional history than its extension, breathing and living amongst us, ever evolving in the present just as it has done for centuries past and those yet to come. His impressive oeuvre is a blend of historical events often weaved into a fictitious narrative against a backdrop of some important historical events. In The Heart of Redness, for instance, he delves into the historic story of uNongqawuse, the Xhosa ‘prophetess whose prophecies catalyzed the cattle-killing of 1856–1857.’ In the book, Mda fleshes out the intracultural implications between the Unbelievers (those who had taken to colonial customs and shunned their own traditions) and the Believers whose faith in the prophetess ultimately led to the mass slaughter of their own cattle and the death of at least 20 000 people.
In some rural settings the issues between amagqobhoka – those who shunned the red ochre and old practices of the Xhosa and amaqaba, the ones who preferred tradition to Western religion are often cause for fiery discussion. According to the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Center for Heritage and Society, heritage ‘is the full range of our inherited traditions, monuments, objects, and culture – in tangible and intangible forms.’ From this premise, ‘it goes beyond material artefacts,’ and would encompass ‘ideas and memories–of songs, recipes, language, dances, and many other elements of who we are and how we identify ourselves–are as important as historical buildings and archaeological sites.’
Despite 21st century refinements, in places like Colesberg, cultural rituals remain an intimate feature of every day life. The weekends usually set the scene for the slaughter of some bovine or another. Whether it’s to mourn an elder relative that passed, or to extend gratitude to ancestors or any of the multitude of reasons why friends and families gather in the name of culture.
One of colonialism and apartheid’s lingering sins was the blatant suppression of the native narrative. How non-whites were simply reduced to vassals and non-entities and virtually obliterated from the annals of their own history. Read the high school textbook and you find that all discoveries were supposedly made by colonial settlers who went on to name them with no sense of irony. Mda’s book which relies – in as far as it quotes verbatim – heavily on the work of historian Jeff Peires was the subject of some criticism.
According to Wikipedia, ‘In 2008, Andrew Offenburger, a historian at Yale University, alleged that Mda’s reliance on Peires’s research amounted to “masquerading plagiarism as intertextuality”. Mda would respond by way of an open letter in the Mail & Guardian:
‘You only have to go to a search engine such as Google Scholar to realise that many academic papers have been written on this novel since 2002 and some of them make a thorough study of the intertextual relationship between The Heart of Redness and Jeff Peires’s The Dead Will Arise. None of them makes the absurd accusation of “cribbing”…
The story of Nongqawuse and the cattle killing is well known; as children we grew up with it. Our language is replete with proverbs based on that story and we sang songs about her. It is our story. Jeff Peires does not own that story. So I can’t steal it from him. He did not invent it or create those events in the manner that I have created the fictional world in The Heart of Redness. But in The Dead Will Arise he rendered those events and interpreted them in a manner that captivated me. I didn’t think of using the Nongqawuse story in any fiction because it was so commonplace until Peires wrote his history book. It was Peires’s rendition of that story that inspired my fiction rather than the historical events themselves, and I had to make that obvious in my fiction by deliberately using Peires’s phraseology as an intertextual device.‘
With the Advent of concepts like ‘decolonisation,’ there are schools of thought that hope to salvage these neglected parts of the story. University scholars, authors and scores of individuals with a vested interest across the board are at the forefront of such attempts at revival. Sadly, especially for those without funding and outside of academia, such endeavours can be particularly difficult to get off the ground.
On the bright side, at the recent SA Museums Association conference, similar topics formed part of the discourse. Institutions like the National Heritage Council encourage applicants interested in the heritage and preservation space to apply for such funding. Seemingly, private donors and overseas institutions are also keen to hear from such people. But history is unfolding at an accelerated pace, and one can only hope that both benefactor and beneficiary will get a move on.