This Freedom Day, we need to have a hard talk about the past and stop avoiding difficult conversations

As we look towards Freedom Day this year, my mind turns to what I feel is a failure to establish the context in which our country as we know it has come to be shaped. In short, why do we commemorate Freedom Day at all?

What has instead taken hold is a seemingly coordinated attempt at erasure because of the potentially difficult conversations that would follow honest engagement with our history. This is particularly alarming as it pertains to the country’s young people.

Living in an ahistorical and acontextual world is a dangerous thing, not just for the individual, but for the collective. It means taking in what seems to be randomly organised bits of information without having enough know-how to convert this raw data into knowledge.

Critical thinking helps you to navigate life and understand why things are the way they are. From this knowledge you can create space to envision how things could be. But without this critical capacity, misinformation and disinformation can take root.

I often see people proudly declaring that they cannot be held accountable for not knowing the historical events that inform present-day South Africa, which, some might be surprised to hear, was not only formed on 27 April 1994. It is impossible that our society is only the result of the past 31 years. To believe that is damaging and leads to an inaccurate critique of the circumstances we now navigate.

A paper by Professor Thembisa Waetjen, titled Youth Between Identity and the Market: Historical Narratives Among South African University Students in a History “Bridging” Lecture Room, examines an element of this and asserts: “Ideas about redress and reconciliation are, of course, positive, but they are often accompanied by the disconcerting proclamation (about which there seems to be general agreement in my class) that ‘people need to just forgive and forget’.

“Such platitudes confirm a view of history as a highly specific injury. The mistrust of historical knowledge and the avoidance – the apparent urge rather to ‘put it behind us’ –  reveals, I am convinced, a kind of trauma and untouchable grief.

“Pressures for reconciliation and celebrations of redress have affirmed the past as primarily a moral narrative in which historical agency is conflated with identity. Moreover, it reifies and affirms culture as a privatised reading of the past, beyond critique or debate and outside historical time.”

The evil genius of colonialism and the apartheid system was such that the psychological warfare it unleashed would invariably continue to sow dissonance, mistrust and resentment, all fuelled by an incomplete project towards justice and reparations, all feverishly contested terrain.

This is what keeps the country spinning its metaphorical wheels: everyone is pointing their fingers at the wrong thing and pulling in different directions from a misguided departure point. This exercise is as exhausting as it is fruitless. To continue to do this means we are bound to remain stuck in this inane Groundhog Day.

This Freedom Day, I hope we all start to reach for our history because, if we are to grow and progress, it’s not possible to live in a world where everything is convenient and comfortable and never difficult. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.