Shaka Day to Braai Day: The evolution of SA’s Heritage Day

Tomorrow, South Africans will be celebrating Heritage Day, also known as Braai Day. Here is the history behind this public holiday.

Braai Day. Images by Store norske leksikon (public domain) and Wikimedia Commons

Tomorrow, 24 September 2024, many South Africans will celebrate Heritage Day, also known as Braai Day. Here is a look at how this holiday has evolved over the years.

Whose heritage should we celebrate?

The South African government states that Heritage Day ‘recognises and celebrates the cultural wealth of our nation’. South Africans typically celebrate the day by reflecting on the cultural heritage of the many cultures that make up the population of the country.

However, in a country with eleven official languages (twelve since the government officially added sign language as an official language last year) and a huge variety of cultures, it can be tricky to define which heritage should be celebrated. Are we as South Africans supposed to explore the heritages of fellow South Africans or embrace our own?

The end of Shaka Day

In KwaZulu-Natal, people previously celebrated the day as Shaka’s Day. This was in commemoration of the Zulu king, King Shaka Zulu, according to South African History Online. The 24th of September is the presumed date of his death in 1828.

However, when the government introduced the Public Holidays Bill in 1995, it did not include Shaka Day. This led to objections from the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), a political party with a large Zulu membership.

The government reached a compromise and renamed the day to Heritage Day. The aim was to celebrate the diverse cultural heritage of all South Africans.

In an address marking Heritage Day in 1996, former President Nelson Mandela stated: ‘When our first democratically-elected government decided to make Heritage Day one of our national days, we did so because we knew that our rich and varied cultural heritage has a profound power to help build our new nation.’

How did it become Braai Day?

Jan Scannell better known as Jan Braai, started the National Braai Day initiative in 2005. His idea behind it was that South Africans should come together around fires on this day to celebrate our rich cultural landscape amidst the backdrop of a shared tradition, i.e. the braai.

This idea resonated with many South Africans. Markedly, Archbishop Desmond Tutu was appointed patron and national spokesperson of South African Braai Day. He famously stated, ‘We’re going to have this wonderful thing … when we all gather around one fire’.