Heritage Day: reflecting on memory and global solidarity with Palestine

South Africans mark Heritage Day on 24 September. In popular public discourse, the day is reduced to “traditional culture”, which is based on ethnicity, with various public and private institutions allowing their staff to wear a traditional outfit for the day, and non-profits hosting events with dancing, cuisine, and spectacle. The current trappings of “Heritage Day” are underpinned by what people dress in or what they consume.

Understanding heritage

Heritage, essentially, is about living memory — the chants that sustained captured bodies during slavery, colonialism, and apartheid, the artistic culture that inspired the oppressed to rise up against injustice, and the underground narratives of exile. These constitute forms of intangible cultural heritage. They are obscured, yet they represent more than memory. They are sites and moments of praxis: activism and advocacy that expand consciousness and empower communities to counteract domination, suppression, and hegemony. For Heritage Day 2025, South Africans must radically reflect on why heritage is never biased. Preserving, promoting, and restoring the intangible heritage of counter-hegemonic struggle is central to the battle of ideas. It instills conscientisation — developing decolonial knowledge that refuses to be forgotten.

Global solidarity

It evokes global solidarity among the marginalised across the face of the planet. South Africa’s liberation heritage holds a legacy of supporting and campaigning for the Palestinian people against political Zionism and Global North domination. Nelson Mandela’s utterance remains key: “Our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

Roots and cultural memory

With the schema: roots, culture, heritage, and decolonisation, this article unpacks how conscientisation processes are made more effective by spotlighting historical memory. Roots: remembering the source globally, anti-colonial movements maintained momentum through deep cultural roots in both the domestic and foreign realms.

In South Africa, freedom fighters memorialised ancestral anti-colonial battles like the battles of Salt River in 1510 and Isandwala in 1879. Algerian guerillas communed with Berber chants in mountainous strongholds. In Mozambique, artists crafted literature infused with traditional proverbs and revolutionary sentiment. Amílcar Cabral called this a “return to the source.” Colonialism displaced communities from their source of being, indoctrinating them to discard their own traditions. The call to remember and enact cultural roots was not performative; it is critical praxis. Through realigning with “source”, people realised their inherent potential to defeat systems founded on inequality and injustice.

Palestinian heritage and resistance

Palestinian heritage embodies the same radical consciousness. Transferring histories orally of the Nakba, preserving embroidery techniques called tatreez that display village identities, and reciting chants in exile keep communities convicted in resistance. These practices are not cosmetic. They are tools of conscientisation, ensuring that the narrative of the oppressed counters the narrative of the oppressor.

Liberation as a cultural practice

Liberation should not be limited to military combat or political struggle. It is also a cultural revolution. Struggle chants carried ancestral energies. Performing arts raised resistance consciousness in rural areas, working-class residential areas, and townships plagued by illiteracy and liberal views. Symbolically, the raised “black power fist” has been translated into an optic that represents global solidarity among oppressed identities. Cabral clarified: “National liberation is necessarily an act of culture.” Culture, he explained, was both defensive and offensive. Colonial forces aimed to disrupt the culture of the people due to its ability to transfer anti-colonial ethics. This cultural anchor is the reason why many liberation movements and post-independence governments on the African continent strongly identified with the anti-colonial struggle of Palestine against the Zionist project.

The Role of literature and arts

Mahmoud Darwish’s literature, read aloud in refugee camps, echoes the ancestral call for justice and truth as South African struggle chants: memory emboldens resistance. Mandela highlighted these cultural ties when he linked post-apartheid South Africa’s struggle to Palestine’s struggle for statehood. Cultural work is thus not moderate; it is praxis. Civil society and creative practitioners can archive and promote struggle-themed objects, literature, film, music, and theatre, but artists, creatives, and cultural workers must repurpose them for contemporary causes of justice and peace.

Unerasing erasure

Heritage is not only neatly polished and curated stories as retold by the establishment. It is what affected and dispossessed communities refused to forget; it is the texts we weave into our contemporary social fabric as progressive communities. Liberation heritage is preserved in the documented lives of warriors long erased, the social practices of solidarity by exiled families and communities, and in the social media posts of martyrs before death. These are not tangible artifacts. They live only if enacted and narrated.

The Importance of civil cociety

Civil society and creative practitioners are important. Oral history projects and digital archives protect fragile memories. Schools can embed liberation heritage into curricula so young people learn not only dates but living intangible struggle heritage. Heritage is worldwide. From Soweto to Hanoi, from Havana to Ramallah, decolonial formations exchanged slogans, materials, signage, and methodologies. To uphold these links is to counter nationalist erasure and to produce counter-hegemonic internationalism. Putting heritage to praxis frames remembering as a tool to radicalise the oppressed into fearlessly resisting domination and imperialism in the 21st century, as the erasure of sterile histories that serve the ruling class and the political elites.

Decolonisation: truth as praxis

Preserving liberation heritage is decolonial praxis. Colonialism thrived on distorting memory and suppressing the lived realities of the colonised. In many cases, post-colonial states perpetuated neocolonial narratives regarding the pre-colonial past and the struggle for independence. Decolonising heritage means centring communities of resilience and resistance in the context of contemporary struggles for social justice, locally and globally. Elders, mothers, diasporas, and grassroots communities are the natural custodians of memory. Cabral emphasised: “Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories.”

Heritage Day as conscientisation

Heritage Day signifies more than attire and song. It is an opportunity for critical reflection. Heritage is about awareness; the day connects past, present, and future. For South Africans, this means solidarity with Palestine. The parallels are obvious: forced removals mirrored in occupied territories, Pass laws mirrored in checkpoints, dispossession mirrored in invasive settlements. Preservation is praxis when it generates solidarity. Communities should implement projects that link anti-apartheid memory with Palestinian resistance.

Civil society can use film and images to spotlight common struggles. Cultural workers can bring Palestinian activists into South African spaces of resistance. These activities translate heritage into processes of conscientisation that resist both the historical memory of apartheid being depoliticised and Palestine’s struggle for statehood being ignored.

The Call: a vision for the future

The vision is clear. Roots function to ground communities. Culture shapes identity. Heritage ensures survival. Decolonisation restores truth. Together they form the pathway of conscientisation. Without them, future generations inherit silence. With them, they inherit tools of resistance.

Heritage Day does not only demand celebration but also commitment. To preserve liberation heritage is to counter amnesia, against neocolonial erasure, and against Zionist propaganda. To uphold Cabral’s ideas, Mandela’s vision, and the sacrifices of countless freedom fighters is to declare: South Africa stands with Palestine. This solidarity is evident in the actions of the SA government taking Israel to the ICJ on a charge of genocide. Intangible heritage functions as decolonial knowledge. It conscientises people to radically understand global hegemony, to remember critically, and to resist globally. Memory is not reactionary. Memory is a call to arms. On 24 September, we must wield it in solidarity.