A conversation about transforming historical trauma into community empowerment through art, activism, and authentic storytelling.
How do we honour our history while building a future that
heals rather than repeats old wounds? This question sat at the heart of a
powerful conversation on Sakhisizwe-Building the nation-Bou die nasie,
featuring three remarkable South Africans who've turned their personal
struggles into community transformation.
Amanda Lan, a martial arts practitioner who channels ancient
wisdom into modern wellness; Emile Jensen (Emile YX), a hip-hop artist using
music as both resistance and education; and Brenda Leonard, Managing Director
of Bush Radio, creating platforms for marginalized voices. Together, they
represent something profound: the understanding that healing our communities
requires both acknowledging our wounds and celebrating our resilience.
"We didn't go through a healing democracy, we just
moved on - and that's not good enough." Amanda's words cut straight to the
core of South Africa's unfinished business with its past. For her, martial arts
became a way to release the anger that many South Africans still carry - anger
that gets passed down through generations like an unwanted inheritance.
Emile's journey began with breakdancing on the Cape Flats,
where silence was survival and dance became language. "You know, a lot of
kids at school, they're told to be quiet, so they go inside themselves and
express in artistic ways," he explained. Breaking offered something unique
- a way to battle without violence, to vent without harm.
But perhaps most striking was Brenda's account of
confronting her own trauma decades later. Walking into a police station for a
routine task, she found herself frozen at the sight of where state it was in.
The body remembers what the mind tries to forget.
One of the most haunting moments in the conversation came
when Amanda’s daughter asked why she kept talking about apartheid: "It's
gone, it's forgotten." Her response - "I actually don't [know what
you went through] because you've never spoken about it" - revealed a painful
truth about how trauma silences itself across generations.
Emile echoed this pattern: "People were saying, we
never ever spoke about this. They didn't even tell their children of that
experience." His song "Butterflies Fly By," inspired by his own
protest experiences, unleashed a flood of suppressed memories in his community.
People living in Australia wrote about still remembering the smell of tear gas.
Children discovered their families' involvement in the struggle for the first
time.
This silence isn't just personal - it's political. As Emile
pointed out, when we leave our children to be "reared by them"
(meaning media and external influences), we lose control of our own narrative.
The conversation took an important turn when discussing
identity and terminology. Amanda challenged the term "coloured"
directly: "I hate the term coloured because I am not a rainbow. You don't
see pink in me... Don't give me a derogative term, because I am of mixed
heritage. That is my honour."
Brenda approached it from a political consciousness
perspective, choosing to identify as a black South African: "Because that
time you had black and whites. If you were in the broad range of black, you
were oppressed."
But Emile went deeper, connecting language to heritage:
"That word 'awe,' when you go do the research, you find that it actually
exposes a connection to the Indonesian archipelago... The language actually
exposes your heritage." He pointed to how parents were conditioned to
suppress these linguistic connections, perpetuating the trauma of cultural
erasure.
Amanda made a crucial observation about how oppression has
evolved: "I prefer to say we're in a different ballgame at the moment.
It's psychological warfare, which was used back then already. The only
difference is now it's masked in a nice guise."
Social media, she argued, has become a tool for mental
colonization, with young people following influencers blindly without
questioning. Emile drew a stark parallel: "During apartheid, you were
called either askari or impimpi if you worked with the enemy. Economics was the
enemy. Now you're called the influencer."
What united all three speakers was their use of creative
expression as both resistance and healing. But they were careful to challenge
misconceptions about their art forms.
When martial arts was described as "aggressive,"
Amanda corrected this immediately: "Dance actually is a heritage - if you
move and you flow like water, it's martial arts. So that's why I go back to the
Khoisan, because the Khoisan danced on the soil. That is our heritage."
She further more explained how hip-hop's origins in kung fu
movies created a connection between movement and resistance: "Hip hop's
influenced by Kung Fu... when one says it's a violent art, I beg to
differ."
These art forms aren't just creative outlets - they're
repositories of cultural memory and vehicles for transformation.
So how do we break cycles of inherited trauma while honouring ancestral
wisdom? The speakers offered several concrete suggestions:
1. Decolonized Education
Emile proposed the need for "a madrasa for all
Africans" - a decolonization process that removes the lies and programming
from formal education. "It takes out all of the lies that they forced on
you. Like they deprogram you."
2. Community Storytelling
Brenda emphasized bringing lived experience into classrooms:
"We need to tell the stories of our people. We need to tell the stories of
our experiences." She offered to speak at schools for free about her experiences
at events like the Bisho Massacre, but found little interest from educators.
3. Parental Responsibility
Emile stressed that "primary teachers are the
parents," describing how he created his own lullaby’s and told his
children traditional creation stories from childhood. "So they grew up
with a different perception."
4. Economic Empowerment
Amanda was clear about the connection between healing and
power: "The minute I have power; I can change things. And the more power I
acquired, the more changes I could mandate, not just for myself, I could assist
communities."
Perhaps the most complex issue raised was how to pass
knowledge to a generation that expects instant gratification. As Amanda noted:
"A lot of children want it just handed over..."
The solution, these activists made, isn't to hand over the baton unconditionally, but to find young people willing to "meet me halfway. I don't want to beg you. If you don't want to work for it, I'm not going to hand it to you."
As Heritage Month approaches each September, this
conversation offers a roadmap for meaningful engagement with our past. It's not
about celebrating a sanitized version of culture, but about honest reckoning
with trauma, authentic connection to ancestry, and practical steps toward
healing.
The speakers reminded us that heritage isn't just about what
we inherit - it's about what we choose to pass forward. In Emile's words:
"We have power to bring about change... Nobody's coming. This idea that
politicians are going to save us. They are supposed to work for us."
This conversation challenges us to move beyond heritage as performance
toward heritage as transformation. It asks us to:
Question the narratives we've been told
Share our stories authentically with the next generation
Use creative expression as tools for healing
Take responsibility for our communities' future
Recognize the connections between past oppression and
present challenges
As we navigate Heritage Month and beyond, these voices
remind us that the work of healing is ongoing, collective, and urgent. The
cycles of trauma can be broken, but only if we're willing to face our past honestly
and work actively toward a different future.
The conversation ends with Emile's practical commitment:
working with communities to create "agents of change" - not waiting
for salvation from politicians, but taking responsibility for the
transformation we want to see.
In a world where the past refuses to stay buried, these
three South Africans offer a path forward: through art, through truth-telling,
through the hard work of healing. Their message is clear - we have the power to
break the cycles, but we must choose to use it.
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