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Celebrating a Distorted Notion of Unity in Diversity

23 September 2022 | Story Dr Mpumelelo Ncube | Photo Supplied

Opinion article by Dr Mpumelelo Ncube, Academic Head and Senior Lecturer at the Department of Social Work, University of the Free State (UFS).

September is the heritage month during which the nation observes and celebrates all that it inherited from preceding generations. This is the sort of inheritance that includes but is not limited to culture, traditions, monuments, knowledge, land, and belief systems. It anchors the nation. The value attached to any form of heritage is what sustains it and any inheritance that may be deemed to be of less value, loses its significance with the progression of time.

Heritage month and day is the time the nation should celebrate oneness in diversity. Unity in diversity requires clarity of mind and extreme levels of tolerance for each other’s uniqueness. South African society presents such diversity in languages, cultures, religions, tribes, politics, and nationalities among others. Although some of these are inherited and others are acquired, they create a mosaic worth embracing and celebrating.

Language is one critical aspect of people’s heritage

We, however, need to be critical of what we celebrate considering the distorted nature of some of what we have inherited. Language is one critical aspect of people’s heritage. It defines who they are and through it, people are able to create their worldview and develop relationships not only with one another but with their world as well. The African history of colonialism and apartheid that is still perpetuated through various colonial matrices of power has and continues to impact negatively on linguistic interactions. The impact is such that the indigenous African languages are quickly losing their depth as communities experience a linguistic shift to English which is a minority language but due to its economic dominance, commands authority. African parents are putting up with a system that demands their children be taught in a language other than their own and many of them see nothing wrong with that. Given a chance, they would demand that the status quo be upheld or even enhanced. These are the lived experiences of colonisation and its impact on daily lives including language.

If you control people’s language, you control their understanding which forms their worldview. You further control the extent of their development as language is pivotal in ingenuity. Ingenuity speaks to inventiveness and originality. Surely, such cannot manifest through the second, third or fourth languages of instruction which is a common phenomenon across the African continent. Even as people celebrate their heritage, many are struggling to identify some features of their heritage in their languages, let alone start and finish a sentence in their mother tongue. In some communities, it is even seen as a sign of being educated. What type of education is this that disinherits you of your mother tongue? In celebrating diversity, why is it that it’s only the black child who gets given an English name? So many questions that are indicative of a system that is unkind to language diversity as it is lopsided to disadvantage indigenous African languages. It renders celebrations of unity in diversity a mockery.

People have been turned tourists in their own heritage

African food, music, and attire form the tapestry of Heritage Day. At least for a day, one gets a rare experience of one’s identity. For a day, people marvel at the richness of their types of food and feel different but good in their traditional attire while dancing to the sounds of their own music. It is one’s heritage after all. The sad part is that people have become tourists in their own heritage. Their identity no longer forms part of their daily lives. It is one to be visited occasionally. Foreign tendencies have formed habits that in turn are creating new identities and heritages. It is these new heritages that the current generations will bequeath to forthcoming generations. However, we as a people would have moved further away from who we originally were. This has dire consequences on the identity and progression of the nation. As we celebrate this September, let us critically think about what it is that we are celebrating when we are detached from the heritage ceded to us by the generations before us.

News Archive

UFS presents unique rally

2005-06-07

On Friday 10 June 2005, the University of the Free State (UFS) will present the Kovsie version of the Amazing Race in Bloemfontein.

The Amazing Rainbow Rally will be held in aid of children and babies with serious diseases in the Department of Pediatrics and Child Health in the Faculty of Health Sciences.

By raising the necessary funds, equipment can be acquired to meet the unique health care needs of these special patients. It will also enable the UFS to maintain the high standards of education, training and research in this field.

The Amazing Rainbow Rally will give some residents of Bloemfontein an opportunity to test their knowledge of the city, as well as their time management skills, communication skills, team work and even their relationships!

About 12 corporate teams from among others Vodacom, Eskom, Medi-Clinic, Mimosa Mall and Nedbank and four university teams must follow a specific route with various checkpoints by car. Here they will have to complete activities or solve clues before receiving their clue to the next checkpoint. Teams will be traveling with cars branded with the logo of the company they represent.

The rally will start at 09:00 at the Rooiplein of the UFS and will again end on the campus where they will complete the last task. The first team to complete this task is the winner of Bloemfontein’s first Amazing Rainbow Rally.

OFM’s breakfast team will do live crossings on the day to reveal how teams are doing.

The Department of Pediatrics and Child Health at the UFS serves children with special needs, in other words children who need intensive care, or who suffer from cancer, heart disease, neurological diseases and conditions, endocrinological diseases or gastro-enterological conditions.

The Department provides secondary health care to more than 250 000 children in the southern parts of the Free State, but is responsible for the tertiary care of about a million children in the Free State and Northern Cape, as well as some parts of the North-West province, the Eastern Cape and Lesotho. The intensive care units at Universitas and Pelonomi Hospitals serve approximately 1 300 neonatal and 350 intensive care patients annually. The pediatric cardiology unit admits almost 300 high care heart patients per year. Approximately 13 000 out-patients visit these two hospitals every year.

MEDIA RELEASE

Issued by:  Lacea Loader
   Media Representative
   Tel: (051) 401-2584
   Cell: 083 645 2454
   E-mail: loaderl.stg@mail.uovs.ac.za

7 June 2005

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