SA’s post-apartheid nationhood is a fragile construct built on personalities and mythologies which seldom reflect the realities of the lives of her people. From the flimsy notion of a “Rainbow Nation” denoting a nation characterised by racial co-existence, to invoking the reconciliatory words of figures like Nelson Mandla as examples of what makes us SA, we have allowed nation-building to be a series of vanity projects such as national sporting events that produce a sense of unity and pride.
Often that is fleeting such as the moment of joy experienced when Simphiwe Tshabalala scored the opening goal at the 2010 World Cup, only for Bafana Bafana to crash out of the tournament without advancing to the next stage.
Nation-building has been reduced to form over substance. A performance of symbols, gestures and emotions that hold little meaning for the nation and her people as we live our lives daily. At best, as South Africans, we have become very good at building up hype, but certainly not the building of the nation.
The nation is her people. Any efforts to build the nation that does not value, progress and invest in the quality of the lives of people is a wasted effort. This wastefulness was evidenced last week when a proposal by the department of sport, arts and culture, whose mandate includes nation-building, to erect a large flag valued at R22m was first revealed.
Amid minister Nathi Mthetwa’s laughable attempts to justify why any flag should cost R22m and President Cyril Ramaphosa’s actual laughter when addressing the matter at a public event, it is apparent that nation-building is not a subject treated with the necessary seriousness by the incumbent government.
In a country with the highest unemployment and inequality, where violence like what was meted out on Namhle Mtwa is a norm and born-free’s like 18-year-old Theuns du Toit are engaging in blatant acts of racism, a glow in the dark flag cannot be a primary project to promote a more cohesive society.
In a society where we struggle to gather R1bn in disaster relief funds together to assist thousands of people who have been left destitute, we dare not spend R22m on a flagpole if we truly care about nation building. The flag does not represent the nation more than her actual people do.
It is time that SA, as a state, invests less into the symbols of the nation, and more on developing the quality of people’s lives and improving the quality of people’s social relations. Beyond shared laws and symbols, what does it mean to be South African? What are the basic rights and entitlements that must be realised for those who are part of this nation? What are the norms and values that we all agree make us human first and quintessentially South African?
As Benedict Anderson in his book Imagined Communities argues, “What I am proposing is that nationalism has to be understood, by aligning it not with self-consciously held political ideologies, but with large cultural systems that preceded it, out of which – as well as against which – it came into being.”
As heartwarming as the concept of a Rainbow Nation may have been at its conception, it was short-sighted to think that we could build a nation on the foundations of a metaphor. At best it was a political symbol that hardly had the kind of gravitas that was needed to catalyse the work of nation-building. It is not the political symbols that will make us most patriotic but shining a light on actions and values that people in SA live that make us most proud.
A R22m flag will not make people more equal and less intolerant. It will not qualitatively improve the quality of South Africans' lives. Imagine if we put R22m into the hands of people truly raising the SA flag. Funding the community activists who fed millions during the Covid-19 lockdowns. Supporting the many volunteer tutors in various communities. Toward gender-based violence prevention programmes or racial literacy activists.
We must insist that what is the best of us must become the standard that we set for the rest of us. It must be that the best values and behaviours already present in our society become the rule rather than the exception. That we cultivate the cultural system, as Anderson would say, that precedes the building of the SA we want to be.
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