My thoughts on Heritage

By: Oyama Vanto - Mandela Bay Development Agency - Coordinator, Creative Industries

My first encounter with heritage at the Mandela Bay Development Agency was, appropriately, somewhat uncomfortable. It began with cleaning. The Gale Monument, the Horse Memorial and the Queen Victoria statue became my first practical introduction to the business of preserving history. It was also the worst possible time to discover that heritage is not simply about old things. The country was in the midst of the Fees Must Fall period, and across South Africa colonial monuments were being challenged, defaced and removed. While much of the country was asking whether certain monuments still deserved a place in the public realm, I found myself responsible for ensuring that some of them remained standing. It was an interesting way to enter the heritage profession, with a maintenance schedule in one hand and an uncomfortable question in the other. Whose heritage was I actually preserving?

That question has stayed with me.

We often speak about heritage as though it is a collection of harmless old objects waiting patiently for us to admire them. It is not. Heritage is memory made physical, and memory is never entirely innocent. Somebody decides what is remembered, what is commemorated, what receives a plaque, what receives a monument, what is restored and, perhaps most revealingly, what is allowed to disappear. A city does not merely inherit its monuments; it inherits the politics that produced them.

This is particularly true in South Africa, where the landscape itself was once an instrument of power. Colonialism and apartheid did not only govern people, they organised space, named streets, built monuments, displaced communities and determined whose histories occupied the centre of public life. Consequently, when we talk about preserving heritage, we must ask a more difficult question than whether something is old or architecturally significant. We must ask what version of ourselves its preservation permits us to remember.

My work with the Gale Monument, the Horse Memorial and the Queen Victoria statue eventually forced me to confront that question constructively rather than nostalgically. I came to understand that preserving a monument does not necessarily mean celebrating everything it represents. History should be preserved precisely because we need to understand it, including the parts that make us uncomfortable. The answer to an incomplete history is not erasure, it is completion.

That is why my work in heritage increasingly turned towards histories that had not received the same physical presence in the city. The Frontier Wars, for example, cannot remain a peripheral footnote to the story of colonial expansion in the Eastern Cape. The history of conquest must exist alongside the history of resistance, dispossession and survival. The Liberation Heritage Route along Steve Biko Street seeks to place the history of struggle back into the everyday landscape of the city, while our work around St Peter’s and the preservation of the history of South End reminds us that heritage is not only about famous people and grand buildings. It is also about ordinary communities whose lives were disrupted, displaced and, remarkably, reconstructed.

This is where our understanding of heritage must become more democratic. The Mendi Memorial, the eMlotheni Memorial, the Langa Massacre Memorial and countless other sites of struggle are not supplementary histories to be accommodated once the “important” heritage has been dealt with. They are part of the national story. Yet one cannot escape the uncomfortable observation that the institutional machinery of heritage has historically been much more comfortable dealing with certain forms of heritage than others. We have elaborate systems for identifying, protecting and interpreting colonial structures, while many sites associated with liberation, resistance and the lived experiences of black communities remain comparatively underdeveloped, underinterpreted or physically vulnerable. If all heritage is equally important, our policies, budgets and institutions should eventually begin to look as though they believe it.

This is why the 2026 Heritage Month theme, “Celebrating Our Living Heritage:

Strengthening the Ties That Bind Us,” is more profound than it initially appears. The important word is living. Heritage is not simply what our ancestors left behind. It is what communities continue to speak, sing, practise, remember and transmit. It lives in language, music, ritual, oral history, food, art and memory. It lives in the stories of South End, in the struggles commemorated along Steve Biko Street and in the stories still waiting to be told. It can also live on screen. Our planned Mandela Bay Film Festival presents an opportunity to make the city itself a storyteller, to give our communities a platform through which the histories of conquest, liberation, migration, culture, industry, music, sport and everyday life can be documented, contested and shared. A monument can stand silently for a century. A film can give the person standing beside it a voice.

Perhaps this is the real work of heritage, not deciding which history should defeat another, but creating a public landscape mature enough to accommodate the whole argument. We should be able to preserve the colonial monument without preserving colonialism, remember the history of empire without romanticising it, commemorate liberation without reducing it to political mythology; and tell the stories of ordinary people with the same seriousness with which we have historically treated the powerful.

So, whose heritage is it?

The easy answer is, ours. But perhaps the deeper answer is that heritage belongs to the living precisely because we are the ones who must decide how to inherit it. We inherit monuments, but we also inherit silences. We inherit celebrated histories, but also forgotten ones. Our responsibility is therefore not to choose which history deserves to exist. It is to ensure that one history does not have to disappear for another to be heard.

 If Heritage Month is genuinely about strengthening the ties that bind us, then those ties cannot be built on selective memory. They must be built on the courage to remember more.

All our histories. All our people. All our heritage. That is not merely preservation.

It is nation-building.