EFF STATEMENT ON HERITAGE DAY: LAND IS EVERYTHING

24 September 2015

The Economic Freedom Fighters marks Heritage Day as the day to celebrate the artistic spirit that continues to distinguish us as people amongst peoples in the world. From the indigenous sounds that spring from lived experiences of our people like maskandi, mbaqanga and all traditional music that has survived over the centuries. To the creative chants of toyi toyi that have carried our people on the picket lines of opposition to injustice over the years.

We know as Fanon says, that “colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native's brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it.” Colonialism does this because it wants to create in the natives mind an idea that it only has given life and should it be destroyed, natives would degenerate into barbarism.

However, it is in the fields of our musical, artistic and language expressions that we know colonialism has failed to completely crush the African spirit. Here, we have always found a way to testify that colonialism did not create everything good about Africa and its people. The EFF therefore celebrates the rock art paintings of the Khoi and San who managed to carry human knowledge from generation to generation kept in the archive of stone. We therefore call on the recognition of the Nama language as an official language to which state investments must be made to preserve and develop it by dedicating a radio station, news departments and programs in the SABC.

The EFF however condemns the celebration of Heritage Day without resolution of the land question. Our cultural heritage must not be marshalled to put our people into sleep as they continue to live like visitors in the land of their birth. We sing on the land, we paint on the land, we dance on the land and we speak on the land; a people without land is a people without a future.

Heritage must not be used to keep our people as prisoners of our towering past, but as a testimony of our today and a foundation for the future. All music and dance from the past, all artistic expression as well as language and indigenous knowledges must tell us one thing and that is we are still not free until we resolve the land question.

Land is the foundation of human dignity without which all culture and art spirit hang in perpetual shame. We cannot be proud without land. The foundation of our heritage are the minerals beneath the soil, the rivers and the dams, the mountains and the hills, the seas and all living organisms found in them. Only the expropriation of land without compensation for equal redistribution will give our people dignity and guarantee their freedom into the future, in particular cultural and artistic freedoms.

Finally the EFF calls on the elimination of Die Stem from the National Anthem. Die Stem is a heritage of oppression and indignity. It is a song of oppressors, racists and mass murderers. Nkosi Sikelela must be sang in the same way as our people did when they were praying for a land free from oppression during colonial and apartheid years. National anthems are songs of collective pride and we cannot be proud of the songs of mass murderous regimes.

Furthermore, call on the removal of all colonial and apartheid symbols, in particular the statue of Louis Botha and Queen Victoria in parliament. The Kruger National Park as a heritage and international destination for tourism must be renamed because Kruger was a colonial racist who engineered and presided over the Boer Republic that was a foundation for apartheid systems. There must be no public celebration and valuation of racists who presided over the oppression and mass murder of the black majority. If South African heritage is to be given any dignity land must be redistributed and all colonial and apartheid symbols must fall.

Statement issued by the Economic Freedom Fighters, 24 September 2015