Time to dress the part with national glad rags

10 October 2011 - 02:39 By Jackie May
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Jackie May. File photo.
Jackie May. File photo.
Image: Times LIVE

I don't often ask for sartorial advice. But I feel that we should urgently develop a national dress.

I don't need it or particularly care for it. My children do.

You may have had a similar problem with Heritage Day celebrations.

It was dress-up day at school on that Friday.

Dress in something that represents your heritage, was the instruction to the unsuspecting children.

"What's my heritage?" was, of course, the question.

Well, if you are an isiZulu-speaking South African, that's straightforward.

Ditto if you are isiXhosa-speaking, or if both your parents are of Afrikaans descent.

But when you're an English-speaking South African with mixed blood, what outfit represents who you are?

My ancestry is confusing to most. Let's start with the paternal Welsh great-great grandfather.

Then there are the maternal great grandparents, who were deaf and mute. Nobody knows where they came from other than the orphanage in which they were raised.

There is a delightfully eccentric English grandmother and another who is American-Kenyan.

My children's father is of Polish Jewish ancestry, among other less exotic bits of DNA.

So what? We're South African. But in our home there wasn't a so-what attitude from my eldest daughter about what to wear for Heritage Day.

We're South Africans but without a traditional dress. And I resented not being able to give my daughter a straightforward answer about what to wear. I suggested a colourful dress to represent belonging to a rainbow nation.

She was not interested. Nor was she interested in the suggestion of wearing a scarf to cover her head, as some Jewish women do .

Instead, she settled on wearing a Masai cloth to represent the bit of Kenyan in her blood.

Isn't this wrong? Shouldn't she be proudly wearing something traditionally South African, something that, like our flag and anthem, says we belong? I don't want my daughter belonging to just her little group of South Africans.

Nor does she need some rah-rah nationalism.

But when she asks about what to wear for Heritage Day next year, I want to suggest something festive and fun .

Perhaps she could wear something like a rainbow hula skirt, of course designed by one of our best and presented to us as our "traditional dress", even if it's just to pacify a few parents and their needy children.

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