Public holidays, and where they come from

Nothing uniquely South African about the date itself. But the day after it is. In Cape Town, 2 January is Tweede Nuwe Jaar, when thousands of minstrels in satin and face paint parade through the streets in one of the oldest continuous street celebrations anywhere, held almost every year since the 1830s. Durban's version is quieter and mostly involves the beach.

A day given over to human rights generally, which is why it carries that name rather than the name of any one event. Schools and community groups often use it to talk about the rights in the Constitution, and it usually lands close enough to the end of summer to be a good excuse to be outdoors. South Africa's date has been taken up internationally: the United Nations marks 21 March as the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. It remembers the lives lost at Sharpeville in 1960, where a protest against the pass laws of the time ended in shooting.

For Christians this marks the crucifixion of Jesus, with Easter Sunday two days later marking the resurrection. Together they are the central events of the faith, which is why churches hold services through the whole weekend and many families keep the Friday quietly. It is also one of only two holidays that wander: Easter is set as the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the March equinox, a formula inherited from the early church, so the weekend can land anywhere from late March to late April. Good Friday is one of the very few days on which South African law restricts alcohol sales.

Easter Monday, until the first democratic parliament rewrote the holiday calendar and gave it a name that belonged to everyone rather than to one faith, though it still closes the Easter weekend for Christian families. In practice it does exactly what the new name says: it is one of the biggest travel days of the year, the tail end of the long weekend when families who drove across the country start driving home again.

Probably the most straightforwardly celebrated day on the calendar. On 27 April 1994 South Africans voted in the first election open to every adult citizen, and the queues are what people remember: kilometres long, in places doubling back on themselves, with many standing most of the day rather than leave. Close to twenty million votes were cast. For a very large number of those in the queue it was the first time, which is why the photographs from that day still turn up on people's walls.

A day off that is, pleasingly, about the right to a day off. The date comes from Chicago in 1886 and a campaign for the eight-hour working day; trade unions in South Africa have marked it for well over a century, and it became an official public holiday here in 1995. The eight-hour day it was originally about is now written into South African law, so the thing being commemorated was actually won.

June is Youth Month, and this is its centre: a day given over to young people and to education. Schools, universities and community organisations use it for bursary drives, career days and events run by pupils themselves, and it is one of the few holidays whose meaning is aimed squarely at the people who have the least say the rest of the year. It has its origins in a schools protest in Soweto on 16 June 1976 over the language subjects were taught in, which ended in deaths and was reported around the world.

Around twenty thousand women marched on the Union Buildings in Pretoria on 9 August 1956, carrying petitions against extending the pass laws to women. They stood in silence for half an hour, then sang. The song gave the country a phrase it still uses: wathint' abafazi, wathint' imbokodo, you strike a woman, you strike a rock. August is now Women's Month, with events and fundraisers all through it. The organisers included Lilian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph, Rahima Moosa and Sophia Williams-De Bruyn, who was twenty-one at the time.

The most cheerfully shared day on the calendar, and the one that best fits the rainbow-nation idea Archbishop Desmond Tutu gave the country a name for. The date was already marked in KwaZulu-Natal as Shaka's Day, for the Zulu king Shaka kaSenzangakhona; when the calendar of public holidays was redrawn it was kept, but widened into a day about everyone's heritage rather than any one community's. Since about 2005 it has also been claimed, entirely unofficially, as National Braai Day, an idea Tutu himself backed on the grounds that it is the one thing the whole country does the same way.

📍 Closer to home than most: Shaka's grave is at KwaDukuza, about an hour up the north coast, and the day is still widely marked as Shaka's Day across KwaZulu-Natal.

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