The history of South Africa recalled on walls, Freedom Park.
Freedom Park encompasses the colonial past, pre-colonial past, as well as the apartheid past of South Africa. With no doubt, the tranquil and serene place certainly does give one food for thoughts!
The beautiful monolith Wall of Names is inscribed with names of those who died during the 8 conflicts within the history of South Africa. Freedom Park brings to light the contributions as well as the sacrifices of the heroes and heroines we know of, and some we don’t even know. There are 162 reeds that symbolizes the re-birth of our nation and it also signifies a nation that is embracing the future. The “Isivivane” or “Lekgotla” serving as a spiritual resting place and a symbolic burial ground of those engraved on the walls. It also serves as the spiritual heartbeat of the whole memorial. An integrated reflection of the culture, history and spirituality of South Africa is surely symbolized at Freedom Park.
Beyond “just interesting”, there is just so much beauty, a sense of boldness and bravery in realizing and leaning to understand the true sense of how far South Africa has come. I left the place rather with a guilty conscience of how ignorant we are, as the youth of today. It is disgraceful of how we hardly engage with our South African stories. It is sad of how over the 800 years of colonialism, we have lost our languages, cultures, beliefs and roots. It is disgraceful of how we claim to be a liberated youth, yet we do not even know what the cost of liberty was, for those who fought for it with blood, sweat and tears. We do not know the history that got us where we are today, and why its bloody path was worth it.
We have reached a place in time where we confuse liberty with choice. Where we treat the history’s struggles as though they are anachronistic and unworthy of acclaim. We have slowly allowed ourselves to forget that enduring freedom has been attained by millennia of challenges, struggles, and feud. You see, slowly but surely, we are becoming a generation of automatons who are unable to distinguish complaint from blame or to differentiate expression from value.
I spent the whole weekend, pondering whether it is our educational system that is failing us, or it is merely our ignorance as a youth. Could it so be that our educational system has deliberately undertaken to produce “cultural amnesia” and a youth that has lack of curiosity? A youth that is rather disguised under claims of “critical thinking, diversity, ways of knowing, and cultural competence”. Yet these buzzwords merely result in the upbringing of “no history, no country, no culture, no identity and no purpose, except in the unified belief that everyone is an independent creature, who later becomes a narcissistic one, whose motivation and intentions cannot be questioned either. I think it is time to question our educational system, if it is really worth reciting Romeo and Juliet “William Shakespeare” instead of history books such as “The history of South Africa” by Es’kia Mphahlele.
I am left rather puzzled, if we really are an ignorant youth that likes to be spoon fed or the blame lies in our educational system…
“History is for human self-knowledge…the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.” R.G Collingwood