In a society with a deeply divided past, there is particular significance in creating space for cultural diversity and acknowledging that South Africa's identity is shaped by many historical and cultural traditions.
Yet, beneath that celebration lies an important question: what does it mean to regard something as heritage?
Heritage is not everything handed down to us from the past; it's a selection from it. Societies continually determine what gets remembered, preserved, honoured, questioned, or quietly set aside.
So, heritage is never neutral. It's intertwined with power, identity, memory and interpretation. And yet it's also more than an instrument of power. It can offer people a sense of belonging, continuity, meaning, connection – things that matter regardless of who's doing the selecting.
Heritage and the interpretations of the past
On Heritage Day (24 September), it's worth recalling that we don't simply inherit a past. We inherit particular interpretations of it. Monuments, museums, place names, literature, public ceremonies, school textbooks, even the stories families tell all contribute to what a society comes to call heritage.
Heritage Day should reflect that complexity. Its value isn't just about celebrating differences but in creating space to reflect on how history, cultures, languages and traditions that constitute this country.
This raises an important question: Who has the power to interpret the past? Whoever does, exercise a measure of influence over how the present and future are understood.
It matters who controls the museums and maintains the monuments, who writes the histories that are taught, which place names survive and which get changed, whose stories make it into the national memory and whose don't. Any honest approach to heritage must take this question of power seriously.
From heritage to responsibility
No society's history is morally pure. No culture owns the truth, or virtue, or a monopoly on suffering. The real challenge is admitting how complex our inheritance is and then asking which parts of it are actually worth preserving – and why.
Heritage and identity often get treated as the same thing but they aren't. To say, "my heritage," can sound like heritage and identity are fused – as if my language, culture, religion or history simply is who I am. But heritage is what we receive; identity is what we do with it. You can come from a particular history without that history definitively shaping every part of you.
There's nothing wrong with taking pride in your cultural inheritance. The difficulty arises when that pride needs some someone else's history to be excluded, denigrated or denied in order to feel authentic.
This distinction – heritage as received, identity as chosen – also opens up a more critical relationship with what we've inherited. You don't have to defend every part of your heritage to value it. You can cherish a language, a literature, a tradition, while still being critical of the political uses it's been put to over the years. Examining your heritage critically isn't the same as rejecting it.
The past shaped the world we live in now: not just culturally but structurally. People inherit consequences too: historical decisions, institutions, inequalities that outlast the moment they were made.
So, the real question becomes: what am I to do with what I've received?
Heritage is a gift and a burden at once. Some of it deserves preserving. Some of it deserves regret or outright rejection. Inheriting something doesn't mean you're obliged to endorse everything that accompanied it.
Which is why it is important to distinguish acknowledgment from glorification. You can acknowledge something as part of your heritage without putting it on a pedestal. A historical figure, a monument, an event can matter – can reveal something true about where we've come from – without deserving to be venerated.
The darker parts of the past belong to our heritage too, precisely because they teach us something we shouldn't forget.
Reconciliation doesn't require everyone to remember the past the same way. It can mean, instead, learning to accept that other people experience and interpret that same past differently. A shared national heritage doesn't have to be one national story. It can be a space where different memories meet, argue and sometimes, correct each other.
Understood this way, heritage isn't only a matter of cultural self-affirmation; it's also a matter of moral assessment too. The question is no longer simply "what belongs to us?" but "what should we pass on to the future?"
This brings into play the idea of living heritage. Heritage is not confined to museums, monuments and artefacts. It lives in languages, practices, knowledge, ritual, music, stories and the small habits of everyday life. And where it's alive, it changes. Whatever lives, evolves.
That means cultural preservation doesn't have to mean cultural stagnation. A culture doesn't need to be frozen at some historical moment to stay authentic. Living heritage absorbs new influences, discards old practices, develops new ones. Change isn't the destruction of heritage; at times, it's exactly how heritage survives.
What heritage do we leave behind?
This places a responsibility on every generation. We're not just recipients of heritage. We are, in turn, becoming someone else's source of it.
So, heritage cuts both ways: it's what the past hands us and what we hand to the future. "What we inherited?" needs a second question accompanying it: "what heritage are we presently creating?"
In the end, that makes Heritage Day a future-oriented occasion, even though it looks backward. To speak of heritage is to speak of the future, since every generation stands between what it has received and what it is about to pass on. Heritage isn't a museum of things gone by. It's an ongoing process of deciding what gets carried forward.
Seen in this light, heritage is itself a kind of ordering. We're continually organising the past – linking events, selecting meanings, distinguishing between the important and the incidental, deciding what to preserve and what to let go. There's no single, immutable South African heritage waiting merely to be discovered and described. There's an ongoing, unfinished process of reinterpreting and reordering it.
So perhaps, then, the ultimate question for Heritage Day isn't "what can we be proud of?" That's a fair question but it's insufficient. The more fundamental one is: "what have we received, what parts of it are worth keeping and what do we wish to bequeath to the next generation?"
That question reorients how you think about heritage. It allows you to value cultural inheritance without romanticising it, to acknowledge historical injustice without demonising entire cultures and to respect other people's memories without flattening every historical distinction into sameness.
In this way, Heritage Day becomes less a celebration of what we already are and more a conversation about what we still wish to become.
Chris Jones is emeritus associate professor in systematic theology and ecclesiology at Stellenbosch University.