[plays untitled song]

Randell Schippers from Cape Town on piano.

That is a very, very old Shangan song from the northern part of South Africa in the Limpopo region and I first learned it, a little part, I mean I've enlarged it a little bit. But I learned it from a young girl who had just come from Limpopo in the northern province which is traditionally the most heritage oriented province in South Africa today. She came in Shangan outfits, like a mucheka.

She lived in our yard, in one of our family yards in a township called Alexandra township, it was a very, very cosmopolitan South African township. It had mostly people from the rural areas and it was a place that was a heritage carnival over the weekends.

This song was a song about Johannesburg, and it was warning rural people not to go to Johannesburg because you'll get mugged, you'll get robbed, you'll get run-over and it's a dangerous place. And she'd just come from the Limpopo and I used to say to her "What are you doing here?" and she said "I had to come and see what the song was really about". And of course later on she went into western dress, she got married to a school teacher etc.

The reason I chose this song is because I came here today to talk a little about heritage and its importance, especially heritage restoration. A great sample of great heritage restoration is England itself because every time there's a royal wedding here, there's major pomp and ceremony about it, it's all medieval and its all about heritage, and of course people buy flags and they buy the biscuits and they buy...

So heritage is something that is beneficial to a society. In Africa of all the societies that have lost their heritage, I think Africa stands in the front line because of education(the misconception of education), because of religion, because of advertisement, because of politics, And because of television over the years. And of course the laws of reshuffling like apartheid was a law of reshuffling people and also creating conflict between ethnic groups.

If you impoverish people also you take away their lands then they are less capable of exhibiting their heritage crafts and their heritage performances. And its a thing that has very much disappeared in most of Africa, especially urban Africa because all this people have been convinced through the list that I've just ran down to you. They've been convinced that their heritage is barbaric, that it's heathen, that it's backward, that it's primitive, that it's pagan, and they've really bought it to an extend where we don't even try to look like who we really are at any time in our lives. And it's a great worry for me because when I look at my grandchildren I figure that when they ask them twenty years from now, who they are, they probably gonna say "they say we used to be Africans a long time ago."

And when people come to Africa this days, they always come to look at the animals, or to find Mandela, or to look at the geographical sites because the heritage performances and arts and grafts have more or less disappeared or have been colonized by expatriate businesses. And the people really gotten to believe over the years, in most of urban Africa, that their heritage is primitive and backwards and barbaric.

I'm very involved in a heritage restoration program where heritage visibility in the form of performance arts, and arts and crafts and design and architecture and the pomp and ceremony and the pageantry of long ago and there's no place that has a more diversified cross section of heritage excellence like Africa has but it's invisible. Nobody had the chance to see when they come to Africa and escorted to the elephants and the lions and the rhinos and the Victoria falls kinds of places. And to a certain extend I'm a little jealous of those places because I think somewhere in there, the people should be found and the people should be able to show their excellence of their heritage.

It's a thing that is really worrying because it is happening to so many other societies all over the world but it's at it's worst, I think, in Africa. It's a major concern I'm on a crusade and I have a group of people, we have a heritage restoration society. To at least make it visible and to be involved in building places where heritage performances can take place. And to restore the arts and crafts and the curio ownership of what the people do instead of working for expatriate businesses.

I also want to point out that the only artists that have really made it overseas as their careers have gone and have lasted are those who are heritage arts oriented. I think the greatest and the first example was Miriam Makeba, Salif Keita, Youssou N'Dour, Lady Smith Black Mambazo and even myself I don't think I'd have been known if I had come overseas and tried to imitate overseas artists. So heritage lives forever and it stays and I think there's no place that needs to see a comeback more than the African diaspora and especially the African continent. I want to appeal to you to think about this and if you're interested maybe we can work together on heritage restoration.

A lot of Africans when I speak to them about this they say "man, why are you trying to take us back into the dark ages?" My usual answer is; if you don't know where you coming from, you're not going anywhere except you're making yourself vulnerable to be swallowed in by other cultures and of course this is the total happening in most of Africa. People don't even want to stay in their rural homelands anymore, everybody want's to come to the city to find this miracle of the worst that doesn't exist and they end up in squalor and things like that.
But most of all, I think, for the future generations and for people that want to find most of Africa that has disappeared there is nothing better than heritage restoration to preserve the history of Africa and also to make the children to know who they really are. Because in the end when you go to India or you go to China or even England. People know England not only because of the queen or the beef eaters or the yeoman but because of its heritage and theres a thing that would be a real pity to miss and to loose in Africa.

We'd like to finish this by playing you another traditional song. As you know, in Africa in the old days and even now in the rural areas, when you were going to get married you have to have a bride price and it was usually paid with cattle and other things but cattle were the most important. And if the woman you wanted to marry was highly educated and very beautiful you'd probably lose all your cattle. But the people who were most worried about the cattle were the eligible bachelors and they always warned the herd-boys; the boys who herded the cattle. To say "boys don't run those cattle too hard because the meat will get tough, so when you driving them cattle, boys be cool. Ha le se le di khanna.

[plays "Ha le se le di khanna"]