Heritage Day in South Africa: Celebrating Resistance and Cultural Identity

September is Heritage Month in South Africa, and yesterday recognised as Heritage Day. This is a period set aside to honour the diverse cultures, traditions, and histories that make up the nation. Heritage, in its intellectual and cultural definition, is more than the preservation of monuments, artefacts, or rituals.

It is the living memory of a people, the values, languages, practices, history, and struggles that define their collective identity and shape their sense of belonging. However, the foundation on which these celebrations are built is profoundly shaky. As a result, Heritage Month often risks becoming a hollow ritual, celebrating fragments of cultural identity while leaving the deeper truths of African heritage buried beneath colonial distortions.

Heritage embodies the intangible and tangible legacies passed from one generation to another, ensuring that history is not erased but rather carried forward as a foundation for future existence. In the African context, heritage is not static; it is the dynamic intersection of memory, struggle, and survival against forces that sought to obliterate identity.

When reflecting on South Africa’s Heritage Day, it is important to recognise that heritage does not only consist of music, dance, or food traditions. It is equally the memory of wars, battles, and sacrifices that were waged to protect African identity from erasure.

The protracted wars of resistance (such as the century-long frontier wars fought by the AmaXhosa against British colonial intrusion) are not mere episodes of conflict but chapters in the book of African heritage. They represent the determined resistance of communities against dispossession, cultural annihilation, and the attempted silencing of African languages, spirituality, and systems of governance.

These South African wars, together with countless other uprisings and liberation struggles, are an integral part of what Heritage Day must honour, for they testify that African people refused to be reduced to voiceless subjects of the Western empire.

The AmaXhosa’s century of resistance was, at its heart, a defence of the land, which is inseparable from heritage itself. Land was not simply territory; it was the keeper of memory, language, custom, and spirituality. To lose it was to lose the very grounds upon which African identity rested. Thus, their struggle was not only political but cultural and existential.

The same applies to the liberation wars of the twentieth century, waged against apartheid and its global allies. In fact, these liberation struggles included African kings such as, inter alia, Chief Kaiser Daliwonga Matanzima. While these wars are often reduced to political milestones, they were simultaneously wars for heritage—wars for the right to speak African languages freely, to teach histories unfiltered by colonial distortions, to worship without imposition, and to live with dignity rooted in African worldviews. By resisting erasure, these struggles preserved the essence of what it means to be African.

Heritage Day, therefore, must not be confined to symbolic celebrations of attire or cuisine. It must equally be a day of remembrance, where the unspoken sacrifices of those who resisted cultural extermination are acknowledged as part of our heritage.

To separate culture from resistance is to diminish the very essence of African identity. The wars of the AmaXhosa, the Zulu, the Basotho, and many others were acts of cultural preservation in the face of destruction. They are reminders that heritage is not only inherited but actively defended.

To celebrate Heritage Day is to affirm that our heritage includes the languages colonialism tried to erase, the songs sung in defiance during uprisings, the names of heroes often omitted from mainstream histories, and the memory of communities who stood firm when their very existence was under threat.

Heritage is not nostalgia; it is the ongoing struggle for recognition, survival, and continuity, as demonstrated recently by China.

Thus, in celebrating Heritage Day this month, South Africans must understand that they are not merely honouring cultural artefacts but commemorating centuries of resistance against erasure (coloniality).

Heritage is the collective refusal to disappear, and it is through this lens that we must recognise the frontier wars, the liberation struggles, and all untold acts of defiance as central to the meaning of Heritage Day.

*The opinions expressed in this article does not necessarily reflect the views of the newspaper.

DAILY NEWS