Heritage encompasses all that we experience in everyday life. It is far more fluid in how it is experienced by society than what we perceive it to be. It is where ideas of individual identity and the role of nation states connect. It is who we are as individuals and how we relate to one another in society.
“In one familiar aspect it, it refers to buildings, monuments, landscapes and artefacts; but it can also refer to values held in common, bodies of memory, even personality traits. The National Heritage Resources Act No. 25 of 1999 specifically refers to a category of ‘living heritage,’ which includes such phenomena as cultural tradition, oral history, performance, ritual, popular memory and ‘indigenous knowledge system." (Shepherd, 2008)
In order to be able to decipher the complexities of our heritage one has to first delve into the history of how we came to experience heritage as we do today. In so doing we seek to find the path that leads to a more inclusive and representative society that we all subscribe to in all its diversity. The National Heritage Resources Act No. 25 of 1999 set out with the aims of stitching together the disparate strands of all society in order to forge a path for the rainbow nation.
Nearly twenty years on it has become apparent that there is a need to revisit and assess how far we are from achieving the goals that the Act sets out in order for us to meet the challenges that...
