Will we ever reach the stage at which we agree on what symbols we display in public? The rage against the statues of Cecil John Rhodes, Paul Kruger, Jan van Riebeeck and others will continue until we find common ground on how we view our past and future. On Monday, Kruger's statue in Pretoria was vandalised, days after a war memorial was set on fire in Uitenhage, in Eastern Cape.As this wheel of our discontent about past symbols continues to roll from one institution to another , we should ask ourselves ho nest and difficult questions.If we manage to remove all the "offending" statues and replace them with our "heroes", are we not repeating the mistake of those who thought an African would never rule this nation?The flaw with the flag up, flag down approach is that it fails to consider the future and looks at erasing and infusing the DNA of the victors until they too are removed from office.South Africa should call for a national dialogue on how we move on from here. It can be that we adopt a piecemeal approach and wait for students and angry young minds to run with the process. Arts and Culture Minister Nathi Mthethwa should be visibly driving the debate.It cannot be that, when this nation is crying out for leadership, Mthethwa is in a shell somewhere waiting for orders to act.What are his views on the current state of affairs? Does he support the total removal of historical statues, and what are his plans regarding memorialising our post-1994 leaders?These are the questions discussed at dinner tables and in shebeens and Mthethwa should be leading that debate.We should not react to incidents driven by today's politics and fail to come up with a programme that will address our present and future concerns. Twenty years into democracy, we have few African public symbols.Past and present public symbols represent who we are as a nation...