Heritage Day

It’s has been a while since we had a public holiday during the working week. If I’m not mistaken, it’s been over three months.

So we welcome Heritage Day or commonly referred to as Braai Day.  I had made certain that every year when this day comes by, I would treat it with the respect it deserved, just like any other South African.

A day of relaxing with friends, being merry and doing as little as possible. However, this year it’s a little different for me. 

So what is your heritage? What does it mean to you? Do you even care? For the longest time I didn’t care at all.

After all, I’m a rural Zulu boy from Greytown, I know how to stick fight, I speak, read and write IsiZulu well…on Facebook at least. What more do you want from me? That’s was my defensive response from my “United Nations” friends. We called ourselves the “United Nations” because all South African races were equally represented in our cluster.

Like a “BEE approved” group of friends. It’s only this year that I decided to take their questions seriously and answer them to myself. It was hard for me to discover that I’m not as informed as I thought I was, when it came to my Zulu culture. How can I, I last read an IsiZulu book in Standard 4…back in 1991.

The same year I last wrote an essay in IsiZulu. So as hard as it is to admit, but I felt like a “diet coke” version of being “Umzulu”(a Zulu person).So today being Heritage Day, I’m going back to where I left off.

I found an absolute gem of a book called “Isisekelo Samasiko” written by NM Ntuli” ,which loosely translates to The Constitution of a Culture. It’s a short book to reintroduce someone like me to a hidden treasure of knowledge that you virtually cannot find anywhere.

I think of it as a “cultural physiotherapy session” to heal my terrible injuries of ignorance about my Zulu culture. 

What does heritage mean to you?