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 “Our heritage celebrates our achievements and contributes to redressing past inequities. It educates, it deepens our understanding of society and encourages us to empathise with the experience of others. It facilitates healing and material and symbolic restitution and it promotes new and previously neglected research into our rich oral traditions and customs.”
SAHRA is a statutory organisation established under the National Heritage Resources Act, No 25 of 1999, as the national administrative body responsible for the protection of South Africa’s cultural heritage.
The Act follows the principle that heritage resources should be managed by the levels of government closest to the community. These local and provincial authorities will manage heritage resources as part of their planning process.
We present this information about SAHRA in order to create an awareness among the people of our country of their right to conserve what they consider to be valuable heritage resources, the mechanisms for doing this, and to recognise the exciting new possibilities that the Act creates for them.
The object of SAHRA is to coordinate the identification and management of the national estate. The aims are to introduce an integrated system for the identification, assessment and management of the heritage resources and to enable provincial and local authorities to adopt powers to protect and manage them.
Issues relating to heritage resources and their value will be increasingly introduced into school curricula, with universities and technikons encouraged to increase heritage management programmes.
The national estate includes movable objects such as those recovered from the soil or waters of South Africa; objects associated with living heritage; ethnographic and decorative art; objects of scientific interest; and books, documents, photographs, film material or sound recordings.
A place or object is considered part of the national estate if it has cultural significance because of its importance in the community, or pattern of South Africa's history, its possession of rare aspects of South Africa's natural or cultural heritage, its strong or special association with a particular cultural group for social, cultural or spiritual reasons.
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