Celebrating Freedom Day

South Africa celebrates Freedom Day on 27 April, the day of our first democratic elections in 1994. The day that marked the beginning of the New South Africa. I blogged about it last year.

I remember sitting in my lab in front of my old computer writing that post. It was written with a really heavy heart because another year had passed without me doing anything to celebrate Freedom Day.

Christmas comes with hosts of traditions. Even people who aren't Christians and who don't celebrate the religious foundation of Christmas usually have family traditions on Christmas. Getting together for a meal. Turkey. Small change in your Christmas pudding. Presents. A tree. And Easter. Easter eggs and Easter hunts. And of course the many religious events that mark those days too. The USA has Thanksgiving, repleat with weird vegetable and marshmellow dishes, pumpkin pie, re-enactments of pilgrims and indians. We have traditions for birthdays too: in my family its opening presents together in the morning, and usually a birthday meal at some stage. There must be a million examples from a million cultures worldwide, of ways to celebrate important events.

Now with the newness of the New South Africa comes all of these important new days. Like Freedom Day, Youth Day and others. Important days, days that the nation has set aside to celebrate aspects of our past.

But because of the newness, we also have no traditions to structure our celebration of those days.

Actually, I should put in a disclaimer at this point: generally speaking, black South Africans have a pretty strong political culture, and from my observations they often seem to have well attended celebratory events. Afrikaans South Africans, too, have a remarkably rich assortment of traditions around the holidays that are most important to them. Leaving of course my people, white English speaking South Africans.

To some degree I agree with Sandile Memela in his blog and his column in the Daily Dispatch today, that we should just get over ourselves and join the general Freedom Day (or Youth Day or whatever...) celebrations, the rallies in stadiums with government speakers, or whatever events we see organised. And I agree that many white South Africans really don't care to celebrate these days, and that is a shameful thing.

But I think he goes too far to call it a boycott.

I want to celebrate Freedom Day. I have friends who want to celebrate Freedom Day. I just don't know how to do it. There is no precedent for me, celebrating Freedom Day. No food we always eat, no place we always go, no songs we always sing, no traditions at all.

So this year some friends and I decided to have a Freedom Day party. I've been trying to organise it quite last minute so I hope it works out. But we haven't quite figured out what to *do* at this party. As I said, we have no songs to sing, or food to eat, or places to go.

So we are probably going to try organise it around the theme of remembering Freedom Day, and sharing stories and memories and thoughts and readings on freedom in general and Freedom Day, 27 April 1994, in particular.

So we'll see how it goes.

Someone needs to start the ball rolling, Someone needs to come up with foods to traditionally eat and songs to traditionally sing and stories to traditionally recite. A Freedom Day liturgy, as it were.

So we'll try.