For a month, the same visual shorthand filled our feeds. A beaded motif here, a traditional print there, a braai emoji in the caption, all timed for 24 September. It looked like celebration. Sometimes it was. Sometimes culture seemed to function more like a seasonal creative direction. And as Heritage Month closes, the more useful question is what remains when the beadwork comes down.

Heritage Day was never meant to be a theme

Before it became a national public holiday, KwaZulu-Natal observed 24 September as Shaka Day. When the proposed Public Holidays Bill omitted it, the Inkatha Freedom Party objected. The eventual compromise was broader: a national day for all South Africans to celebrate their diverse cultural heritage, first observed in 1995 (SAHO). A year later, speaking in Uitenhage, Nelson Mandela explained the thinking behind it: “a profound power to help build our new nation.” (National Heritage Council). Building a nation deserves more than a pattern overlay, and more than one month.

In South Africa, heritage is multilingual by design

Language is where heritage becomes practical. Stats SA’s Census 2022 found isiZulu (24.4%), isiXhosa (16.3%) and Afrikaans (10.6%) to be the most common languages spoken at home, with English at 8.7% (Stats SA). Yet English remains the default for much of our brand and corporate communication. And since July 2023, South African Sign Language has been the country’s twelfth official language (The Presidency). As we argued in our brand voice audit, consistency in South Africa doesn’t mean sameness. It means staying recognisably you while speaking to people where they are. Heritage is the same principle at national scale.

When heritage is the strategy, not the backdrop

Few brands show this better than one from our own city. Gqeberha-born Laduma Ngxokolo founded MaXhosa Africa in 2010, building a design language rooted in Xhosa culture and beadwork traditions, reimagined through contemporary knitwear. Today, 28 September, after five previous seasons presenting in Paris, MaXhosa Africa stages its first official runway show on the Paris Fashion Week calendar. Ngxokolo puts it plainly: “This is not about proving that we belong.”(Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode; Sunday Times).

The timing is a happy coincidence, but the point stands. MaXhosa doesn’t switch its heritage on for September. It’s sixteen years of consistent identity, built by someone who lives inside the culture the work draws from. That’s what it looks like when heritage isn’t an add-on. Heritage is the brief.

 The global picture: same tension, higher stakes

The pattern repeats worldwide. UNESCO estimates that at least 40% of the more than 6,700 languages spoken worldwide are threatened with long-term extinction, and the UN declared 2022–2032 the International Decade of Indigenous Languages to draw attention to it (UNESCO).

The commercial case is just as clear. A CSA Research survey of 8,709 consumers in 29 countries found that 76% of online shoppers prefer to buy products with information in their own language, and 40% will never buy from websites in other languages (CSA Research). That survey covered Europe, Asia and the Americas rather than South Africa, so it shouldn’t be treated as evidence of South African consumer behaviour. But in a country with twelve official languages, the broader signal about the relationship between language, accessibility and connection is difficult to ignore.

Culture can also be borrowed badly. When Louis Vuitton’s 2017 menswear collection drew on Basotho blanket imagery, it prompted debate in Southern Africa about homage, appropriation and cultural ownership. Some criticised the collection; others, including South African designer Marianne Fassler, saw it as tribute. (Wanted). The disagreement itself is instructive. Cultural inspiration doesn’t arrive without context. Questions of origin, credit, interpretation and who gets to tell the story remain part of the work. The raw material was the same as MaXhosa’s: heritage. The relationship was different.

Before Heritage Month becomes a memory, ask:

Who does this story belong to, and were they part of telling it? Would they recognise themselves in the result? Does it speak their language, literally? And what will we be saying on 1 October?

Our perspective

At Design@Bay, heritage isn’t a campaign we switch on in September. We work in Gqeberha, a city where several languages share the same streets, and one idea guides us: the isiXhosa proverb umntu ngumntu ngabantu, a person is a person through other people. Good communication works the same way. It’s built with the people it speaks to, not projected at them. That’s why cultural context, language and inclusive storytelling sit inside our audience analysis and narrative work from day one, not at the end of the brief.

As Heritage Month closes, the conversation doesn’t have to. If your communication needs to speak to South Africa in the languages, symbols and stories it actually lives in, Design@Bay is here for that conversation, in October and every month after.