By Nco Dube | 23 September 2026

South Africa knows how to perform heritage.

We wear it beautifully. We dance it confidently. We cook it, photograph it, parade it and, every September, temporarily move it from the margins of public life to the centre of the national stage. Heritage Day has become one of the few occasions when the country seems comfortable displaying its many cultural selves without immediately turning difference into conflict.

That is worth protecting.

But we should also ask a more uncomfortable question: what happens to a culture that can still be performed, but can no longer reliably reproduce its knowledge?

A small story from this year’s Heritage Month captures the problem better than another speech about diversity. Wikimedia South Africa is running a month-long campaign encouraging volunteers to translate articles about South African heritage from English into local languages. During one of the translation sessions, a student reportedly chose Afrikaans rather than her own mother tongue. When asked why, she explained that she could not write her home language because the school she attended had never properly taught her how.

There is something quietly devastating in that.

When a Language Becomes Ceremony

A language can remain alive in the mouth while becoming weak on the page. It can survive in jokes, family conversations, songs, prayer and ceremony while slowly disappearing from the places where modern knowledge is stored, argued, tested and transmitted.

That is not preservation. It is a narrowing of cultural life.

English and the Hierarchy of Knowledge

South Africa’s approach to heritage has become highly competent at symbolism. We recognise eleven spoken official languages alongside South African Sign Language. We have ceremonies, public holidays, royal institutions, museums, cultural festivals and constitutional protections. Yet the hierarchy of language in the serious business of the country remains stubbornly familiar.

English dominates universities, corporate life, much of the media, the professions, scientific publication, technology and large parts of government. African languages remain socially powerful and culturally rich, but they are still too often treated as languages of identity rather than languages of advanced knowledge.

A language is not fully alive merely because people can greet one another in it. It must be able to explain a balance sheet, prosecute a criminal case, teach calculus, debate monetary policy, write software documentation, describe a medical diagnosis and argue philosophy without constantly escaping into English for the difficult parts.

If it cannot do that, its speakers eventually receive an unspoken message: your language is good enough for home, but not quite good enough for the future.

The Digital Divide Is Also Linguistic

This is where Heritage Month can become too comfortable.

We dress children in traditional clothing on Friday and send them back into classrooms on Monday where intellectual seriousness is still overwhelmingly associated with English. We celebrate indigenous languages in speeches while many parents themselves understandably prefer English-medium education because English remains the passport to universities, jobs and economic mobility.

That contradiction cannot be solved by shaming parents. They are responding rationally to the society we have built.

If English gives your child greater access to employment, higher education and the wider world, choosing it is not cultural betrayal. It is economic strategy. The real failure belongs to a country that has allowed proficiency in an African language and access to modern opportunity to appear as competing choices.

The Department of Basic Education has at least begun confronting part of this problem through Mother Tongue-based Bilingual Education. Its programme extends African-language teaching beyond the foundation phase, including mathematics and natural sciences, rather than forcing the old abrupt transition in which many children moved from learning in their home language to learning complex concepts primarily in English. The department itself acknowledges that African-language learners have historically been placed at a disadvantage by this transition.

That is important progress.

But the deeper challenge is not simply the language in which a teacher explains mathematics. It is whether the language itself is continuously being expanded so that it can carry the intellectual life of a modern society.

Languages do not become technically sophisticated by decree. Somebody has to create the terminology. 

Somebody has to write the textbooks, edit the dictionaries, translate the concepts, produce literature, build digital corpora, subtitle films, publish academic work and argue publicly over which new words actually work.

This is where the digital age creates both an opportunity and a danger.

Artificial intelligence learns from enormous bodies of existing text. Languages that are richly represented online enter this new age with an enormous advantage. Languages with thin digital archives enter it already behind. If isiZulu, Sesotho, Tshivenda or Xitsonga have far less searchable, structured and high-quality material available than English, the next generation of AI tools will inevitably understand and serve them less effectively.

The digital divide is therefore no longer merely about who has internet access. It is also about which languages the internet knows.

That should change the way we think about linguistic development. Translating a Wikipedia article into isiZulu may appear minor beside the grand questions of economic development. It is not. Every serious piece of knowledge added to a language strengthens that language’s capacity to survive in the knowledge economy.

The same applies to journalism, publishing, podcasts, academic work and public institutions.

South Africa should be commissioning far more serious non-fiction in African languages. Universities should reward intellectual production in them rather than treating English publication as the obvious marker of scholarly seriousness. Public broadcasters should not confine indigenous languages disproportionately to entertainment, phone-in radio and cultural programming while the most technically complex economic and political analysis gravitates towards English.

There is an uncomfortable class dimension here too.

English proficiency increasingly functions as cultural capital. It signals education, employability and membership of professional life. A child who speaks polished English is often assumed to be clever before they have said anything particularly clever. A child wrestling with English can be judged intellectually weak while actually wrestling only with the language in which intelligence is being measured.

That is one of colonialism’s most durable achievements: not merely imposing another language, but making fluency in that language look like intelligence itself.

Multilingualism Without Intellectual Surrender

None of this requires turning English into an enemy.

English is one of South Africa’s great assets. It connects us internally and globally. 

It gives South Africans access to immense bodies of knowledge and enables people from different linguistic communities to communicate. Any serious attempt to weaken English would be self-defeating.

The objective should be addition, not subtraction.

A genuinely multilingual South Africa should produce citizens who can operate confidently in English without having to abandon intellectual sophistication in their home languages.

That is harder than wearing traditional clothing once a year.

It requires money, institutions, writers, teachers, publishers, technologists and political seriousness. It requires parents to believe that an African language can take their child somewhere. That belief cannot be manufactured by slogans. The institutions of the country have to make it true.

Heritage Must Remain Useful

Heritage survives when it remains useful.

Zulu culture did not survive for centuries because each generation perfectly reproduced the previous one. It survived because people adapted language, practice and identity to changing circumstances while retaining a recognisable cultural core. Living heritage is not an artefact preserved behind glass. It is inherited material continuously made fit for the present.

That is why the student who could speak her language but not write it should trouble us.

She is not evidence that young South Africans have abandoned their heritage. She is evidence that our institutions have sometimes failed to equip them to carry it forward.

A country can lose a language long before the last speaker dies.

It begins when the language stops being used for the things society considers important.

When science happens elsewhere. When law happens elsewhere. When technology happens elsewhere. When serious writing happens elsewhere. Eventually the language remains vibrant in ceremony while shrinking in authority.

That is the danger South Africa should confront this Heritage Day.

The question is not whether our children know the dance.

It is whether their language will still be capable of explaining the world they are dancing into.