What do we inherit from those who came before us and how much of it are we meant to carry?
We inherit things we never asked for.
A name.
A language.
A family.
A history.
A place.
Sometimes we inherit expectations.
Sometimes opportunities.
Sometimes wounds.
And sometimes, something much larger than any of these.
A life that was waiting for us before we were old enough to decide whether we wanted it.
In December 2024, Masalanabo Modjadji was formally recognised by President Cyril Ramaphosa as Queen Modjadji VII of the Balobedu Queenship.
She had been identified as the successor while still a child. Because she was a minor, her maternal uncle, Prince Mpapatla Modjadji, served as regent until she reached adulthood.
But recognition did not end the question of succession.
Members of the Modjadji royal family, including her brother Prince Lekukela Modjadji, have challenged the President’s recognition in the Pretoria High Court. Among the issues raised are questions about customary succession, her upbringing away from the royal homestead, and whether customary requirements were fulfilled. Those claims are contested by Masalanabo’s legal team. The matter remains before the court.
The details of the case belong to the court.
But there is a question underneath them that belongs to all of us.
What does it mean to inherit a life that was already waiting for you?
Most of us will never inherit a throne.
But most of us inherit something.
A child learns a language before deciding whether that language belongs to them.
They enter a family before they understand what a family is.
They receive stories about where they come from before they are old enough to ask whether those stories are true.
They inherit ways of greeting, remembering, celebrating, mourning.
They inherit ideas about what a good life looks like.
Some of these things become so familiar that we stop experiencing them as inheritance at all.
They simply become us.
That is where inheritance becomes complicated.
Because to question something we inherited can sometimes feel like questioning ourselves.
And yet what we inherit is not always something we are meant simply to preserve.
Nor is everything inherited something we are meant to leave behind.
There are things worth carrying.
Things worth changing.
Things worth allowing to end.
The difficulty is knowing which is which.
We like to imagine ourselves as authors of our own lives.
Perhaps we are.
But no one begins with a blank page.
Before we choose our words, we are given a language.
Before we decide what belonging means, we have already belonged somewhere.
Before we develop our own understanding of responsibility, we have watched other people practise it – or fail to.
Even the person we think of as “me” has a history.
There are people we never met who helped shape the world into which we arrived.
There are decisions we never made that created opportunities or difficulties we now live with.
There are stories that began before us and may continue after us.
This does not make us prisoners of the past.
But neither does it make the past irrelevant.
Perhaps the more interesting question is what happens between inheritance and choice.
The Sanskrit concept of dharma opens another way of asking what we owe to the life we have received.
Dharma is difficult to reduce to a single English word. It can encompass ideas of responsibility, conduct, relationship, order and the particular circumstances in which a person finds themselves.
What matters here is not the instruction to “follow your duty.”
It is the possibility that responsibility might sometimes arise from the life we have received rather than from the life we would have designed.
That complicates our usual idea of freedom.
Elsewhere, in very different intellectual and cultural settings, we find another way of understanding the person – not as an isolated individual who first exists and then enters relationships, but as someone whose identity is formed through relationships with family, community, lineage and place.
These perspectives do not say the same thing.
They should not.
One may place greater weight on circumstance and responsibility; another may emphasise relationship and belonging; another may ask how inherited patterns become part of the stories we tell about ourselves.
But placed beside one another, they make the same familiar question feel less simple.
Perhaps the question is not only –
What do I want to do with my life?
Perhaps it is also:
What has my life already placed in my hands?
A language survives because someone speaks it.
A story survives because someone tells it.
A custom survives because someone practises it.
A value survives because someone carries it forward.
So does a prejudice.
So does an injustice.
So does a wound.
The person who receives something may not have created it.
But for a while, it passes through them.
That may be one of the stranger things about being human.
We can receive something without choosing it.
We can be shaped by something without agreeing with it.
We can belong to something and still question it.
And what we do with what we have received can alter what reaches the person who comes after us.
The past arrives in the present through people.
Not only through monuments and books.
Through us.
END
A throne makes inheritance unusually visible.
There is little anonymity in it.
A person does not simply inherit a title. They inherit a relationship with a people, a history, a system of succession and expectations that existed before them.
That is part of what makes the dispute surrounding the Balobedu Queenship so compelling beyond the legal question of who should occupy the position.
It brings different understandings of inheritance into the same room.
Who has the authority to determine what is carried forward?
What makes someone belong to a lineage?
Can a person inherit a role if their life has unfolded outside the place in which that role was traditionally prepared?
What happens when the law, the royal family, customary practice and an individual’s own life do not seem to point in exactly the same direction?
These are not questions with easy answers.
And perhaps that is precisely why the case reaches beyond the throne.
Because inheritance is not only something that happens to royalty.
It happens quietly, every day.
Around dinner tables.
In family names.
In the languages we teach children.
In the stories we repeat.
In the stories we leave untold.
In what we are proud to pass on.
And in what we quietly hope will end with us.
Maybe the burden of inheritance is not simply that something has been placed on our shoulders.
Maybe it is that we did not choose what arrived there.
We did not choose the family we entered.
The history before us.
The circumstances into which we were born.
The things we were taught before we were old enough to examine them.
And yet, at some point, what was received becomes part of the life we are living.
The past is no longer entirely behind us.
For a while, it is passing through us.
We cannot take responsibility for everything that came before.
But neither can we pretend that nothing came before.
Somewhere between those two truths is the strange territory of being human.
We receive.
We interpret.
We carry.
We change.
And eventually, whether we intend to or not, we hand something on.
Which leaves us with the question:
What do we owe to what we did not choose?
And perhaps, beside it:
What happens to an inheritance when it passes through us?
What have you inherited that you chose?
And what have you carried simply because it was handed to you?
Pull Up a Chair
Join the conversation.
What do we owe the past and what are we free to leave behind?
