Cape Town - The Economic Freedom Fighters on Thursday said celebrating Heritage Day without the rightful return of land to those who were dispossessed and the removal of all symbols of colonialism and apartheid rang hollow.
“The EFF condemns the celebration of Heritage Day without resolution of the land question. Our cultural heritage must not be marshalled to put our people into sleep as they continue to live like visitors in the land of their birth,” EFF national spokesman Mbuyiseni Ndlozi said.
“We sing on the land, we paint on the land, we dance on the land and we speak on the land; a people without land is a people without a future... Land is the foundation of human dignity without which all culture and art spirit hang in perpetual shame. We cannot be proud without land.”
Ndlozi said the EFF was therefore reiterating its call for land expropriation without compensation.
“Only the expropriation of land without compensation for equal redistribution will give our people dignity and guarantee their freedom into the future, in particular cultural and artistic freedoms.”
He went on to call for Die Stem to be dropped from the national anthem, calling it a song of racists and murderers and for all place-names evoking white rule to be changed.
“Die Stem is a heritage of oppression and indignity. It is a song of oppressors, racists and mass murderers. Nkosi Sikelela must be sang in the same way as our people did when they were praying for a land free from oppression during colonial and apartheid years.”
He said the Kruger National Park was among those places the EFF wished to see renamed.
The party would continue to push for the removal of all symbols of the country’s colonial and apartheid past “in particular the statue of Louis Botha and Queen Victoria” at Parliament.
“The Kruger National Park as a heritage and international destination for tourism must be renamed because Kruger was a colonial racist who engineered and presided over the Boer Republic that was a foundation for apartheid systems,” he said.
“There must be no public celebration and valuation of racists who presided over the oppression and mass murder of the black majority. If South African heritage is to be given any dignity land must be redistributed and all colonial and apartheid symbols must fall.”
ANA