03 Dec 2023

An intangible cultural heritage (ICH) is a practice, representation, expression, knowledge, or skill recognized by UNESCO to be part of a place’s cultural heritage, are worth safeguarding and celebrating.

ICH includes things such as taboos, proverbs and everyday things that we live and derived from cultural way of living.

“The definition is divided into five domains to describe ICH by the State Parties of the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of ICH,” states National ICH Committee member expert Bathusi Lesolobe in an interview.

The 2003 convention deals with practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills that communities recognize as their cultural heritage; communities and bearers are key actors for safeguarding and transmission; experts are associated.

Lesolobe said the definition describing five domains of ICH included cultural expressions, where elements such as poetry, proverbs, riddles, history of the people on how they express themselves among others were found.

Performing arts is also another domain encompassing indigenous art such as traditional games, poetry, dance and song.

“This domain deals with performing arts,” he said.

The festive events domain, he said, had to do with festivities where communities come together to celebrate and express themselves in some way.

Examples could be weddings, initiations (bogwera and bojale), mantsho a ngwana and others.

“Mantsho a ngwana in itself is a festivity, a cultural expression because we are celebrating a new life that we have,” Lesolobe said.

Knowledge on cosmology is another domain which deals with knowledge on weather patterns. “This is a domain which our people are able to read and know in advance of drought years, how they are able to tell that autumn is upon us and it is time to harvest and feast,” he said.

This domain also included elements such as child ailments healing such as go rwesa ngwana phogwana as well as traditional healing and also some ailments, which required traditional healing. “We say traditional healing because we want people to recognise that ke bongaka jwa setso which has nothing to do with witchcraft, but healing,” said Lesolobe.

The last domain is traditional craftsmanship, which are cultural practices done by hands; elements such as traditional decorations (lekgapho), pottery, woodwork, go dira ditilo tsa dikgole, go suga diphate and others.

With these five domains of ICH, it was then that around the years of 2000 and late 1990s when internet started being popular that it was realised that countries could easily share each other’s culture and even live it.

“The problem was that even though everyone could do that, developing countries were suffering as their youths were adopting hip hop styles of the west. And then UNESCO was able to intervene to ensure that our cultures were not dying,” Lesolobe said.

With modernity came threats to ICH; due to over commercialisation as well as tourism. “Over commercialisation is a problem,” he said. Once the concept of ICH came into being, communities realised that they can make livelihoods out of it, also creating economic social development messages.

“Practitioners were now starting getting paid by corporates for entertainment, eventually also hosting festivals especially in the Kgatleng area with dikhwaere.”

Lesolobe said commercialisation also brought in tourism, as people from other communities would come and experience what they do not have in their communities, ‘and this meant raising prices to attend such activities as tourists come in numbers.’

By raising prices, Lesolobe said the community was unable to attend their own activities, because it was now crafted for tourism.

“The people who could be ensuring that dikhwaere stay authentic are communities but are not because of raised prices for the tourists.”

However, ICH can still be preserved and safeguarded for the next generation and sustainability, as the convention’s main purpose is to safeguard and ensure they do not get instinct along the way.

“We want to safeguard ICH because we want the next generation to also practice them,” said Lesolobe.

He said there were 12 safeguarding measures, but four critical ones were identification, research, documentary and inventory.

Other measures include recognition, transmission, enhancement and revitalise among others. Lesolobe noted that any state or anyone can do their safeguarding according to their territories. Ends