Today, on Heritage Day, I proudly celebrate my Afrikaner heritage. Afrikaners became a people in Africa through settlement, not through a later arrival from elsewhere. From 1652, Dutch, German and French Huguenot settlers at the Cape slowly formed a new community on African soil: they adapted European farming and faith to a harsh frontier, their language grew from Dutch into Afrikaans, and generations were born, buried and bound to the land. The trek inland, the farms, the churches and the long memory of drought, war and harvest made that bond deeper still. That is why the love of South Africa and of Africa is not borrowed or theoretical — it is the love of the only country in which Afrikaners came into being. Afrikaner heritage is therefore a South African heritage. There is no other homeland waiting across the sea. There is only this one home: South Africa.