The Makhado Municipal Council is contravening the South African Constitution and is delinquent in terms of respecting the basic human rights of residents of the town Louis Trichardt. 

“More than three years after the Makhado Municipal Council admitted in 2005 that it had no official policy on the equitable handling of the cultural heritage of all groups in the community, and agreed that such policy should, as a matter of extreme urgency, be put in place, Council is still without such policy – and seemingly determined to keep on running roughshod over the cultural heritage of most of the cultural groups in the community, out of sheer tribalistic and political vengeance,” says the chairperson of the Chairpersons Association, Mr André Naudé.

Naudé emphasized that the lack of such a cultural policy is pertinent in the widening rift and continued polarization in the community, caused by Council’s repeated tampering with the name of the town of Louis Trichardt – a name which various groupings consider as part of a positive and valuable historic heritage.

In the aftermath of the disastrous meeting two weeks ago between Council and the Chairpersons Association (CA), this serious void, with dangerous polarization potential, came dramatically to the fore. That meeting ended in chaos, when the chairperson, Councillor T K Mudau, refused to allow the chairperson of the CA to deliver his presentation and led other councillors in a long-winded and one-sided debate on what Naudé should be allowed to say in his presentation. Members of the CA walked out of the meeting in protest against the unacceptable attitude and insulting actions of chairperson Mudau, which was rejected as a shameless abuse of the official power entrusted to him.

Mudau’s interruption of the presentation was sparked by Naudé’s reference to a letter in which the then mayor of Makhado Municipality in 2005 agreed that an official policy on dealing with the cultural heritage of all the cultural groupings in the community should be put in place, to ensure equitable treatment for all cultures and to avoid insulting and divisive, selective, one-sided treatment of cultural goods.

This admission by the mayor followed after Council, in a special meeting requested by the CA, was confronted in 2005 with the totally unacceptable way in which Council dealt with the bronze bust of the respected pioneer Louis Trichardt and a group of paintings depicting scenes from Louis Trichardt’s diary. These valuable cultural objects were unceremoniously removed from their prominent public display in the civic centre in Louis Trichardt.

A public outcry followed when the bust was later discovered in a seriously neglected state amongst trash cans in a municipal tool shed. Council was, at the time, taken to task about its obvious disregard for and disrespectful handling of these cultural objects and the fact that an exclusively Venda cultural figure was prominently featured in front of the Tourist Info Office site in Louis Trichardt, while no provision whatsoever had been made for the display of statues of the prominent cultural figures of other groups in the community. At the time, Council’s attention was drawn to the fact that, while Council fittingly responded vehemently to the vandalising of the statue of Makhado and the mayor declared that those responsible should “rot in jail,” Council’s own treatment of the bust of Louis Trichardt could be equated to malicious official vandalism, perpetrated by Council and its officials.

The then mayor consequently undertook to appoint a special task team to arrange for the fitting re-instatement of the removed cultural objects (Louis Trichardt’s bronze bust and the paintings) and to come up with an official policy for the equitable treatment of the cultural heritage of all cultural groups in the community.

The bronze bust of Louis Trichardt was then cleaned and placed on display in the public library in Louis Trichardt. The historic paintings, however, never surfaced fully. Those residents and taxpayers of the town who attach great historic and cultural value to these paintings are still, three years later, on an ongoing basis being deprived of their basic right to enjoy this part of their cultural heritage. This is in contravention of the SA Constitution, which guarantees each individual in South Africa the basic right to the unimpeded enjoyment of its own culture.