THE ROLE OF CULTURAL HERITAGE IN NATION BUILDING AND DEVELOPMENT

A paper delivered by Mr Mosibudi Mangena, Deputy Minister of Education,
to the African History Month Celebration on 25 February 2001 at King Luthuli Transformation Centre
Johannesburg.

In addition to the fact that human beings have a bigger brain that
allows them the capacity for profound and abstract thinking, human
beings are also distinguished from other animals by the fact that they
have culture. Without culture we all reduce to ordinary animals.

That sum total of customs, rituals, norms and values make us human. They
govern and regulate the patterns of our day to day life.

There does not always seem to be logic in the things and rituals we
engage in. There does not seem to be logic in the respect that we accord
the dead, the vigils and fuss we make just to put a dead body in the
ground. The only reason we do that is because we are human.

There does not seem to be any logic why we don't mind people seeing our
noses, ears and hands but we jealously and scrupulously hide other parts
of our bodies. The only reason we do that is that we are human.

It seems the essence of marriage is mating and procreation. But human
beings go through a complicated process of courtship, lobola, wedding
and blessings in the church just to achieve this simple thing. But even
after all these have been completed, the mating still occurs in secret.
Other animals just get on with it anywhere and in the majority of cases
openly.

These norms, values and rituals cover almost everything human beings do.
We do not just eat or relieve ourselves. There are acceptable human ways
of doing these things and there are unacceptable ways.

Respect for others, their property, their spouses, the dead and for life
are all part of the values that make us human. Rape is not only bad
because it is against the law, but because it is socially repugnant. It
goes against the values we hold dear as human beings. A brute that
commits rape is not only a criminal in the legal sense; he is also a
social and moral outcast. Most animals would not have a concept such as
rape.

Our values, norms, customs and rituals are intricately intertwined with
our languages, music, dress and dances. Because different peoples around
the world speak different languages, dance differently, have their own
music and manner of dress, culture also gives us an identity. And this
intangible thing called identity is just as important for individuals as
it is for families, communities and nations.

An identity - the need to preserve it, promote it and keep it alive is a
perpetual struggle of both individuals and nations. Your identity is not
only a current thing. It is derived from and dependent upon the
cumulative and sum-total of your cultural heritage. All the things that
your ancestors have done on the cultural front, i.e. their language,
dances, rituals, dress, food and all that, contribute towards your
present identity.

Now, it has been stated again and again by a lot of clever people that
development is a function of culture, that you cannot develop a people
outside of their experience and cultural ethos.

This makes perfect sense because the development of a people cannot be
imposed. It has to be an act and an activity of the masses of the people
themselves. There is a school of thought that explains the
underdevelopment of Africa in terms of the absence of culture in all
attempts at development on this continent.

It should be remembered that Africans of antiquity were a highly
developed lot. While the rest of humanity in a number of continents was
still in the dark, Africans, especially in North Africa, were running
highly developed empires. They built the pyramids we can still find in
Egypt; they made cloth, paper and engaged in writing and practised
mathematics. They are reputed to have trained great mathematicians such
as Pythagorus and Archimedes.

After the collapse of these great empires, Africans became the hunted
and the oppressed people who lost their civilisation and their ability
to write, make paper and build empires and pyramids. Africans became
slaves, colonial objects and victims of neo-colonialism. Whatever
social, economic and scientific developments occurred in the world,
happened at their expense, their disadvantage and certainly not at their
instigation. Because they were politically, economically and culturally
oppressed, these developments happened mostly outside or even against
their cultural ethos.

In the case of Africans the problem is further compounded by the fact
that the education we received is so alienating.  Because no education
in the world is politically, ideologically and culturally neutral, the
African educated elite are strangers to their own people.

To start with, the education we receive is in a foreign language. The
social and cultural nuances and messages are foreign. But the sad thing
is that the educated African is so proud of his/her deculturalisation
that he/she emphasises it and tries hard to put a distance between
himself/herself and the uneducated mass.

The educated elite enjoys the food of those whose education he imbibed.
He tries hard to eat it in their manner, style and atmosphere.

He enjoys and appreciates the music of others and is proud to display
his tastes to all and sundry. He turns his back to his own and looks
down on the music and dances of his people. If we still have any
authentic African music and dance, we should thank our own uneducated
people profoundly. The educated lot are the worst cultural traitors you
could find. But the tragedy of it all is that the educated African can
only aspire for European culture and mannerisms, but can never be
European. He remains African in features, location and origin, making
him a perpetual student and a poor imitation of the European. He spends
his time in a zone of blurred images that lies somewhere between Europe
and Africa. He has one foot in Europe and one in Africa, trying all the
time to lift the one foot out of Africa, but failing miserably to do so.

Forced by the imperatives of this cultural duality, he duplicates
everything to satisfy both worlds. If he has to marry, he will go
through the African customary ways, which include lobola, etc., and then
repeat the same thing the European way by buying rings, receiving church
blessings and parading in the street in white-wedding gowns. The tragedy
of it all is that it costs so much for a people who are not that
wealthy.

They go to church on Sundays and then at night secretly consult
traditional healers and perform ceremonies in reverence to their
ancestors. They give themselves an African name as well as a European
one so that they are in good books within both cultures.

This African educated elite, with their split personalities and blurred
vision of everything, cannot be agents of development in their own
society. They are trying hard to run away from their own people, at
least culturally, and they are unable to harness the energies of the
masses for development.

They are also unable to impart their knowledge to the masses of their
people because their education was acquired through a foreign language.
Most of us are unable to explain to our own people in our own languages
what is it we learnt in our academic careers.  We assembled here cannot
conduct this conversation in our own African languages, and yet we are
supposed to be discussing and celebrating our African culture, history
and heritage. There is indeed something phoney and unreal about us.

Again, these lots of clever people I referred to earlier tell us that no
nation has ever developed on the basis of a foreign language. Does this
not perhaps explain why development is such a difficult process in
Africa? That the problem is that the foreign language alienated Africans
who tried to impose development on their people through that foreign
language and outside the cultural experience of their people?

These same clever people are the ones who tell us that the memory of a
people is in their language and that you can't dream in a foreign
language. The memory of your cultural heritage is in your language,
which means that when you lose your language, you also lose your
cultural heritage.

A people that can't dream can also not sing, dance, write poetry or
develop.

That's why we should mourn when we switch on our radios and TV's and all
we can hear or see is foreign music. We should mourn when we see our
young people turning their backs on their own music and languages.

When we see people vulgarising koma, that African socialising
institution, and therefore hastening its demise, we should mourn. We
must mourn when we see our people denigrating bogosi, not primarily
because it is feudal, but because it is African.

Only when Africans own and cherish their cultural heritage, when they
identify and embrace the majesty of Mapungubwe, when they speak and
learn through their languages and can therefore dream, sing and dance in
their own languages, shall we see rapid social economic development of
the people of Africa.

Thank you