The Unfinished Business of Cultural Justice

Zamikhaya Maseti

Since the dawn of democracy in 1994, September has been inscribed in South Africa’s Calendar as Heritage Month. It is a historical necessity born of centuries of denial, exclusion, and cultural dispossession.

The vision was clear: South Africans of all colours, creeds, and classes ought to celebrate their traditions and heritage in diversity. Yet this democratic imperative has remained uneven. While the Constitution enshrines the equal dignity of all cultures, the lived reality often betrays lingering hierarchies, with the heritage of the formerly oppressed still marginalised in the public imagination and in state resources.

Heritage Month should thus not be reduced to folkloric displays or token rituals. It should serve as a deep meditation on the unfinished business of cultural justice, ensuring that indigenous languages thrive, that Black knowledge systems are institutionalised, that sites of memory are preserved, and that the Nation re-centres its identity around the experiences of those who carried the heaviest burden of dispossession.

The Heritage is political. It is about land, memory, language, and identity. To honour Heritage Month without addressing these material and symbolic questions is to betray the promise of freedom.

Let us reflect honestly on the progress made thirty-one years later. Such an honest reflection must confront the perennial question: have we succeeded in building a South African Nation united in diversity, or are we still trapped in the larger bondage of Bantustanisation, political, cultural, and psychological?

We must ask ourselves this question with sober seriousness: what is uniting us as South Africans, and what is dividing us? For unity cannot be assumed, it must be built, protected, and nourished. 

Our Constitution promised a rainbow tapestry of belonging, yet beneath the surface, the fractures of race, class, and geography persist. The Heritage Month invites us not only to wear our traditional regalia or dance to the drums of memory, but also to interrogate the deeper meaning of belonging in a land where dispossession was systemic, and its scars remain etched in both the soil and society alike.

The spectre of Bantustanisation did not vanish with the collapse of Apartheid’s legal edifice. It mutated and survives in new guises. Thirty-one years into democracy, we still witness the geography of poverty etched along the old Bantustan boundaries. 

Rural communities, the heartlands of African heritage, remain underdeveloped and peripheral to the mainstream economy. The Democratic State has invested in social infrastructure, but the structural neglect of these areas is glaring: roads that collapse with every rainy season, schools that are poorly resourced, and cultural institutions that are treated as afterthoughts. This is not the vision of a Nation united in diversity; it is the persistence of historical marginalisation in democratic clothing.

Economically, we are still divided by an Apartheid landscape. Therefore, the Heritage cannot be celebrated meaningfully while the majority of South Africans remain dispossessed of their ancestral lands, watching them being commodified and accumulated by a minority. This economic Bantustanisation fragments us further. Black heritage is celebrated in symbolic gestures, while White privilege enjoys the material benefits of Heritage embedded in ownership and Capital. 

To speak of heritage without addressing land is to deny the very basis of African civilisation, which understood land not merely as property but as identity, memory, and spiritual grounding. Culturally, Bantustanisation is also evident.

Indigenous languages are relegated to the margins, even as the Constitution recognises eleven official languages. The public sphere still privileges English and Afrikaans, while the African languages are treated as secondary, even exotic, rather than as the living arteries of African civilisation. 

Our Museums, Archives, and Heritage sites, too, remain captured by colonial narratives, with limited transformation in how they represent the African story. If we are honest, what divides us is not merely race or culture, but the stubborn continuity of apartheid’s architecture in our economic, spatial, and cultural realities.

What unites us is our shared aspiration for dignity, justice, and belonging, but aspiration alone is not enough. Without dismantling the inherited patterns of exclusion, our talk of unity in diversity risks becoming hollow sloganeering.

What we have witnessed over the past few years is that the privileged, White South Africans and a complacent segment of the Black Middle Class have reduced Heritage Day to a mere braai day. They indulge in consumption, smoke-filled backyards, and the language of casual leisure, stripping the day of its political and historical gravity.

Meanwhile, the poorest of the poor are bused into stadiums, and are expected to perform loyalty while listening to the speeches delivered by national and provincial leaders. This spectacle is not the celebration of a shared heritage; it is the sharpening of contradictions, cultural, social, and political, that haunt South Africa’s post-Apartheid project.

For the White race in particular, there has been little reckoning with the demand to see themselves as part of a South African Nation united in diversity. Too many continue to live in insulated cultural enclaves, economically fortified, their heritage centred on private property, exclusive schools, and suburban memory.

A Nation cannot be built when one part continues to deny responsibility for historical injustice, and when another part, the Black Elite, mirrors that denial through consumerist indifference. Heritage Month then risks becoming a theatre of division, a site where the working class and rural poor are paraded as cultural custodians, while the privileged retreat into private indulgence. 

Much as we appreciate the role of sport in uniting a Nation, we must be honest about its limits. Whenever the Springboks are playing friendly matches or defending the Rugby World Cup, we often see this sea wave of National unity, an orchestrated coming together of South Africans draped in green and gold.

It is a stirring spectacle, but one that is temporary, fragile, and often illusory. Immediately after the rugby season ends, that artificial unity fizzles out, and we return to the old fractures of Bantustanisation, racial, cultural, and economic. Contrast this with soccer, the game of the African majority. 

The Soweto Derby, between Orlando Pirates and Kaizer Chiefs, attracts tens of thousands of supporters, overwhelmingly Black, who fill the stadiums and electrify the atmosphere. Yet the National embrace accorded to rugby is not extended here.

Soccer remains coded as Black, even parochial, while rugby is celebrated as a symbol of National pride. This is a telling reflection of how heritage and culture are unevenly valued in post-Apartheid South Africa. 

Sport, then, exposes the contradictions of our so-called unity in diversity. It reveals the symbolic gestures we cling to, while deeper inequalities remain unresolved. Until we decolonise our cultural imagination, even the triumphs of the Springboks will remain a veneer of unity over a Nation still fractured at its core.

The Heritage Month must be reclaimed from the shallow rituals of tokenism and consumerist indulgence. It belongs to all the people of South Africa, White and Black, not to the privileged few who braai in isolation while the poor are paraded for display. 

* Zamikhaya Maseti is a Political Economy Analyst and holds a Magister Philosophae (M.Phil) in South African Politics and Political Economy from Nelson Mandela University.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL, Independent Media or The African.