Heritage Day

What the day was before it was this

In KwaZulu-Natal, 24 September was Shaka's Day: the commemoration of the Zulu king who welded the Nguni clans into a single nation and died in 1828. People gathered at his memorial to honour him.

When the first post-apartheid parliament brought forward the Public Holidays Bill in 1994, the date was not on it. The Inkatha Freedom Party, whose membership is substantially Zulu, objected to the omission. What came out of the argument was not Shaka Day restored and not Shaka Day abolished, but a third thing: a day on which all South Africans could observe and celebrate the different heritages they had brought to the country. It became a public holiday in 1995 under the name it still has.

That is a particular kind of solution — the sort a country reaches when it has decided that no single past is going to be the official one. It is also, unavoidably, a compromise, and there are people who feel it took something away from KwaZulu-Natal and gave it to nobody in particular.

And then the fire

In 2005 Jan Scannell — who goes by Jan Braai — had the idea that the one thing South Africans of every background do is cook meat over wood, and that this could be what the day was for. He called it National Braai Day, later Braai4Heritage.

In 2007 he persuaded Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu to become the campaign's national spokesperson. Tutu's argument was about the word rather than the meat: eleven official languages, he pointed out, and only one word for the thing. "It's braai in Xhosa, it's braai in Afrikaans, it's braai in English, it's braai in whatever. And it has fantastic potential to bind us together." He talked about the 24th as the day the country would "all gather round one fire" and be "South Africans doing one thing together".

The National Heritage Council was not persuaded at first: it rejected the idea in 2007 as trivialising a day about heritage. It endorsed the campaign the following year, in 2008.

What actually happens

Both things, mostly at once. Schools and workplaces hold heritage events and people come in the dress of whichever of the country's cultures is theirs — beadwork, xibelani, whatever it is. And then a very large number of households light a fire in the afternoon and stand around it.

Whether that is a national ritual or an advertising campaign that worked is still argued about, and the argument is part of the day.