Developing Our Revolutionary Heritage
The Programme of the South African Communist Party: “The Road To South African Freedom” says: “The state should encourage in particular the unity of the African people and foster the spirit of unity of all South Africans. It should encourage and stimulate the development of healthy, non-antagonistic national consciousness … It should encourage the development of national cultures, art and literature.”
In terms of revolutionary thought, “The elimination of national oppression … is possible only under a consistently democratic republican system and state administration that guarantees complete equality for all nations and languages and international cooperation is possible only between equals.”
The success of the struggle to overthrow apartheid, national oppression, racism, group privilege, guarantees the groundwork for the unification of all our different peoples into a single South African nation. THIS AMALGAMATION, WE STRESS, CAN ONLY HAPPEN UNDER CONDITIONS OF FREEDOM AND EQUALITY OF ALL GROUPS, but this equality also includes that of their various cultural identities, which of course rules out the racist criteria formulated by the apartheid state.
Flourishing under the warm sun of the equality of all people, our culture, art and literature will intermingle as our liberated peoples will do, blossoming into a South African culture; we shall then read a South African literature, not what is described as merely
