EFF statement on heritage day: give land to the people

24 September 2014

Economic Freedom Fighters celebrates heritage day as the day of art, language and land. The heritage of the South African arts flows from the rock art of the Khoi and San people to the Tsonga nwana dolls that are used in initiation: the colorful wall painting of the Ndebele, with their rainbow beads making bracelets and necklaces. EFF celebrates the musical creative spirit which remains a marker of South African uniqueness in the world with the jazz, house, Kwaito, mbaqanga musical genres, to the resistance chants of protests and revolts.

EFF celebrates the diverse languages that make our national dialogue: with an emphasis that Nama must be included as an official language recognised in the South African constitution. The languages of the native populations remain excluded and marginalised in the educational development and enrichment of our people. On heritage day EFF calls for an investment in the translation of all the sciences into native languages to ensure that through language our people can take on the world, the very world of science and technology.

Above all, the EFF marks heritage day as the day of the land, which is the master heritage for any art, culture and language to find expression. The greatest heritage of any people is the land and until land is returned all else stands to in flux and can be misappropriated. We dance on the land, we do music on the land, we make sculpture on the land and all else using the resources that the land gives us.

On this heritage day EFF recalls the heritage of resistance from the fighters who fought against colonial invasion and land dispossession defending the one resource that guarantees human dignity. This is because without land, a people remain visitors in their own country of birth. Without land, all culture and art is vulnerable to extinction, doom and waste; they cannot even be protected from plagiarism by the rest.

Our heritage is our land, our minerals and our seas. Celebration of our heritage should mean that we all benefit from our land, minerals and our seas. EFF therefore calls on land expropriation without compensation for equal redistribution to safeguard the culture, art and language heritage of our people.

Statement issued by the Economic Freedom Fighters, September 24 2014

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