Africa Don't Crack
South Africa is a country consisting of diverse cultures from western all the way to African, a wise man once said that “we are a cocktail of different cultures” as every culture from Africa you can find it in south Arica.
Instead of embracing our differences we stereotype, generalise, undermine and even fight each other on which culture is better and who should go back home and who are the rightfully owners of the land, crazy enough those statements are said by people of the same skin colour fighting among themselves.
We live in a society that is very good at bashing other cultures for instance we categorise cultures as every Zulu man is supposed to be a taxi driver, every gold digger is Xhosa, every loud woman is Pedi or every dark skinned person is either Venda of Tsonga and even worse
We now choose on which culture is considered to have beautiful people and which one is not, but what does that do to our country? Low self-esteem and self-doubt is being injected on our systems.
Now we try hard to become what the society wants and even have multiple personalities in order to fit in and along the process we are losing our black excellence by forgetting where we come from, our roots, morals and even lose ourselves.
We have become a society that waits for things to happen instead of making things happen, we are lazy to get to the top but instead we use someone who is already on top just to be on top as well.
Is this the freedom that our forefathers fought for? Well it also goes back to the people that we look up to now, before we used to look up to our grandparents and parents because we were amazed on how they would work a 12 hour job a day and still have the strength to spend time with the family and connect more.
Times have changed as we now look up to people who keep telling us that we do not need education to become successful or people who treat expensive alcohol as an achievement and people who have deserted their cultures because
“they are not cool.”
Culture is something that we should take pride in and celebrate not once a year but instead celebrate it each and every day because it is who we are, without our cultures we are a lost nation.
We are even fortunate enough to have people who are not originally from South Africa but they are Africans which gives us the opportunity to learn more about their cultures and become informed and even gain back our black excellence as we have lost it.
We now live the social media life more like filtered life leaving our cultures and adopting the modern life that is considered to be normal, we now categorise ourselves according to our skin colour from “dark to light skin” forgetting that we are all black regardless of the shade.
South Africa could be a much better place if were able to stick together and not fight each other because of our nationality or even our skin colour.
By: Sphiwe Charity Dhladhla
