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TODAY 100 years ago, the South Africa Act came into force. King Edward VII had signed this historic legislation into law on September 20 1909. This marked the exclusion of African people from the main body politic of SA.
This was, in many ways, not the beginning but an important milestone in the history we share as a people of SA. This served as a catalyst that would trigger off succeeding events that came to shape our common history as a people.
In appreciation of this history, we take cognisance of the fact that current challenges cannot be understood unless we look back to where we come from.
Our understanding of the current conditions can only be enhanced by a candid and open-minded engagement with our collective past, out of whose womb was forged and shaped our modern nation.
The relevance of the formation of the Union of SA for us in the new dispensation is significant. These two epochs place a responsibility on all of us not to repeat the mistakes of history but rather to draw meaning and isolate lessons for today and the future.
The main point is this, if we agree on what happened in our history, we are well disposed to have consensus on how to address the challenges we face. Among the challenges that define our era are the accumulated disabilities including residual racism, economic inequalities, inequitable land distribution, and how we choose to define ourselves as individuals, communities and ultimately as a nation.
The Union of SA did not take place in a vacuum. It was brought about by major events which shaped the nature of the Union itself, and how SA would thence be configured in the 20th century and beyond. These events include the successive wars of dispossession and multiple laws of discrimination and dispassion.
The Peace of Vereeniging was the assertion of British dominance over the Voortrekkers. Significantly, this marked an end of the Voortrekkers' rush away from British dominance. Simultaneously, it dashed the hopes of the Africans to gain the franchise.
In a way, the British imperialists, despite their victory in the South African War, schemed to cede political management of the country to the defeated Afrikaners, in order to continue with the economic lordship of the country without having to grapple with such distractions as black resistance.
In a word, Afrikaners were to serve as a bulwark against African nationalism.
As a milestone, therefore, the Peace of Vereeniging thus necessarily shaped the evolution of SA.
Equally vital to note is the fact that these events do not represent the entirety of South Africa's establishment.
It is a historical fact that the excluded black majority in this making of our history were, among others, represented by the South African Native National Congress, which was the predecessor of the African National Congress.
Equally worth noting, is the transcendence over ethnic divides among the oppressed, including the Indian and coloured South Africans, led by such visionary figures as Mohandas Gandhi and Abdul Abdurahman. All these emphasise the unity of excluded social groups in a struggle against the unjust system excluding the majority of the populations from defining their history and determining their destiny.
The foresight of the leadership of these organisations, which, despite legitimate historical claims to the geographic entity called SA, enabled them to make a deliberate decision to espouse an all-inclusive national consciousness.
The post-1994 South African non-racial democracy is therefore a logical outcome of this long history of lofty principles that sought to construct a unitary nation.
On the other hand, the Union of SA ushered in the era of growing Afrikaner nationalism fuelled by the need to address the so-called "poor-white problem".
Successive Boer governments sought to address this poor white problem as an index of both political and economic liberation of the Afrikaner. Many of the racially discriminatory laws which were introduced during successive white governments after the formation of the Union reflect this existential anxiety to uplift poor whites at the same time as keeping blacks at bay.
In addition, these consequential policies were also part of social engineering to nurture the idea of white supremacy as the superstructure underpinned by unequal economic arrangements in favour of whites as a racial group. For good measure, this was also accompanied by plans to silence or intimidate those who disagreed with this wholesale implementation meant to address the challenge of poverty among Afrikaner people.
The inescapable conclusion is that nationalisms, if not based on economic underpinnings, amount to a mirage. Afrikaner nationalism found concrete expression in the economic sphere.
Institutions such as Sanlam and Santam were established with the intention of employing and skilling Afrikaners. In a glaring historical irony, modern-day SA's legitimate empowerment of the historically excluded black people is condemned as discriminatory practices. This is done in spite of the sore need to address precisely the legacy of these objectionable past policies. Unfortunately, such ahistorical opposition to unequal conditions is perpetuated by people who should know better.
The relevance of the Union formation for us in post-1994 democratic SA is of immeasurable historical import to the extent that these two epochs place a responsibility on us never to repeat the mistakes of history but rather to draw meaning and isolate lessons for the present and the future.
We now have a unitary state based on a universally acclaimed constitution with one national anthem and one unifying flag to which all South Africans pay homage.
As a milestone for our country's history, we should discuss and debate the significance of the Union for us in 2010. We have to acknowledge and embrace our history for what it is. This means in simple terms, we cannot vacuum out what we regard as repugnant including apartheid, and then hope the history will be objectively told for this generation and to posterity.
For that reason, museums such as the Voortrekker Monument and Freedom Park, represents this collective history. If any section of our population is depicted negatively in these monuments, the point is, it is still our history. At the same time, our responsibility is not to become prisoners of history. Our historical mission is not to allow ourselves to suffer from "islands of memory" - which means we remember some elements of history and select to forget those that make it uncomfortable.
We should always be guided by the strategic goal to create a united, democratic, non-racial, non-sexist and prosperous South African nation.
Therefore, we are compelled to be consistent in addressing our approach to history regardless of what it says about the exploitation of resources and acts of dispossessions.
As South Africans, we need to own up to this collective history. Whether odious or admirable, all sections of our society have played a part in the development of our history that ultimately shaped the character of modern-day SA.
This shared history must help us evolve a common destiny, based on the reality that our future is, in any case, indivisible. [This article first appeared in the Business Day on May 31, 2010]