- The past should inform but not limit how today’s children define themselves or their future.
- Forcing cultural traditions or historical expectations on young people restricts their sense of identity and belonging.
- True heritage empowers children to imagine, create, and express themselves authentically in the present and future.
Our children do not belong to history. What happened in the past has absolutely nothing to do with them. They are young people who live in the here and now. They are the present and future of this beautiful land. Much as they are products of colonialism of a special type and apartheid, that history is not their heritage.
We cannot turn them away from school because they do not own a cultural dress. No principal or teacher should insist that they fit into tribal ethnic boxes and categories they do not belong to. We cannot deprive them of a sense of identity and belonging because they are not appropriately dressed.
Our past experiences and traditions have nothing to do with them. Our great-grandies do not know the experiences of today, and they have never been here. Let us not blackmail and condition them to embrace what is dead in the name of culture and heritage. For they must come up with their own sense of who they want to be and how they want to live their lives.
Not everything that is history is heritage
Not everything that is our history is heritage. The past is dead and gone and not coming back. To unleash the future, children must be free to reimagine themselves.
We have failed to give their country a new name, holding on to a geographical description called South Africa, which is a no-name. The children should be confident and free enough to change it, if they so wish. They belong to the house of the future that we shall not live in.
We cannot afford to move backward. We are not who our great-grandparents were. Holding onto nostalgia and sentimental claptrap, dressing up in beads, costumes, and feathers that neither come from this country nor were created by us for us, is a distortion.
All this cultural dress sense was created by our conquerors, who recreated us in their own image. Eating the intestines is not our food. Praising God in a church is not our religion. Not speaking indigenous languages is not us. To wear leopard skin to mark royalty is not us. The Seshweshwe and Mocheke are not us. The songs are not our own. The beads do not come from us. The very idea of celebrating heritage in the way we do is not us.
Free the children to define themselves
It is a serious mistake to make our children like us. We should, as adults and parents, strive to be like them. We have brought the albatross of the past into the present, to disfigure the future. Thus, the children cannot chart a new path to the future they want.
We blend them to know where they come from. Yet the duty of the young is to be true to themselves, and to be arrows that fly towards a new target even if they will not reach it. Free the children to not live in the ways of the dead Past.
Building a new country demands that they move on, away from the known to the unknown, for the old to die and the new to be born.
Let the children define who they want to be, choose the life they want to live, and set new goals and dress styles that they want for themselves. For that is to free cultural self-expression.
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