Many discussions of civil society never take the trouble to examine the conditions for the existence of civil society. Much is taken for granted. My interest in this chapter is in questioning this seeming givenness of civil society. Where one concern may, on the assumption that we already know the object of study, be to identify and analyze its workings, my concern is to establish an important ingredient in the constitution of civil society. In a continent that has grown more than sceptical of the blessings of civility and even questions its possibility, this question must be asked. Starting with no givens, we shall put forward a fundamental condition for the possibility of civil society.

I explore the thesis that, in order for there to be civil society, there must be giving and receiving. In spite of its somewhat pedestrian tone, we must realize that this is not about what is usually, and unreflectedly called "give and take". The latter is unhelpful in this search because it participates in what is evidently the problem in human relations: a kind of giving which refuses to receive but takes by force or guile what it wants. For the most glaring example of this one needs look no farther than colonialism, with all its impositions of what is supposed to be good for the colonized, on the one hand, and blatant denial of reciprocity, on the other. Yet the attitude underlying this kind of giving can, and often does, assume more subtle and even respectable forms. It is this characteristic of one-sided giving and studious rejection of reciprocity that I seek to capture with the notion of patronage.

Combining asychoanalytic focus on the issue of difference and otherness with an ecological perspective, in conjunction with gleanings from European and African philosophy, I will explore the dynamics of giving and receiving in ways that endeavor to show how some of the most "progressive" thinking around is still locked in the patronage paradigm. With application to our findings in the South African situation, questions arise about the meaning of the idea(ology) of civil society that may be left as rhetorical questions, which provoke further thought, or may serve as starting points for further research. But before we venture too far into uncharted waters, a few definitions need to be made.

Of the several meanings of patronage the one that most clearly brings out the problematic of one-sided giving is the one that is distinguished by offensive condescension toward the recipient. It is an aspect of this that people are complaining about when they refuse to be patronized. Relevant as this meaning is to our discussion of the construction of civil society in post-apartheid South Africa, it is the other pole of it, the invisible one, that illuminates the path for us. Just as vulgar racism has in recent years tended to retreat, giving way to more subtle strains of chauvinism, so with patronage: in its refined forms it has ingeniously purged the overtly offensive elements and assumed a socially more acceptable and politically correct posture of supportive interest and concern. To speak of patronage in these terms, however, does not mean that it can be pinned down to a stable sentiment or attitude. Too often it remains fluid at the edges and imprecise in its thrust. Saul Dubow’s (1995:7) description of scientific racism as "unstated assumptions and unthinking responses" comes closest to capturing the nature of patronage as it is used in this chapter. Further echoing Dubow on the nature of scientific racism (which is applicable to patronage), we should think more in terms of "collective mentalities" or "more or less conscious `habits of mind’" (:5).

Two randomly chosen examples will suffice to illustrate this. The first one relates to the strange pieces of legislation called "Masters and Servants Acts" (Gann 1964:44), which were pillars of colonialism in southern Africa. These laws, it may be said, were codifications of a general consciousness of European settlers’ perception of themselves as superior (masters as opposed to employers) and Africans as inferior (servants as opposed to workers). The second one is about a kindly slave master in the Caribbean who, on discovering that his slaves were about to commit suicide, so as to rid themselves of the horrors of slave life, offered to die with them. Hanging oneself had become tolerable, even attractive, to slaves on account of a belief they held that upon death the slave would return home to Africa. We see the power of the kind of patronage that is under discussion in that even this possibility of freedom, at extreme cost, is denied the slave in its very nascence.

In their anger and frustration at this wanton destruction of valuable "property", masters were known to react to suicides in a variety of ways. One master was in the habit of chopping off the heads from the dangling corpses, with the express aim of ensuring a headless existence in Africa for wilful returnees. Not so with our hero, benignly disposed Major Crips, who amazed his suicidal slaves by offering to hang himself with them, so that he could accompany them to Africa: "I’ll hang myself with you. I’ll accompany you. I’ve bought a big sugarmill in Africa, and there you’ll work for me" (Galeano 1985: 256-257).

The first example illustrates patronage of the overtly offensive type, which rigorously erects and maintains a sharp divide between the master race and the servant races. As an oppressive structure this type of patronage is relatively manageable from the servants’ perspective, as they are in no doubt as to what they are dealing with. The second example, subtle and deceptive to the extent of erasing the external features of the master-slave boundary, and even choosing to make the supreme sacrifice of solidarity in death, affords the slave no such opportunity for do-it-yourself consciousness raising. There is a primary lesson here for situations of reconstruction which are sequels to liberation struggles, the diverse, and often disparate, elements of which might have been held together by the mortar of fighting a common enemy. As the internal conflicts and contradictions reassert and re-align themselves, or new ones develop during the reconstruction phase, it is important to look for signs of a streak of patronage that might have been subdued in the heat of struggle and are now re-emerging, sometimes with a vengeance. Integral as it is to negotiations of power from an advantaged position, patronage is a part not only of such obvious outlooks of dominance as colonialism but is endemic to all situations where power is taken, brokered, negotiated or distributed. Each time it rears its head, it causes violence.

To call any kind of giving a cult may be to overstate matters a little bit, but the decision to so designate one-sided giving is made advisedly, on the basis of close observation of the pattern of giving endemic to western cultures. If colonialism was about taking - raw materials, raw labor- it was also about selective, violent giving, distinguished by lack of reciprocity. Cult in this respect refers to the manner in which this stylistic of giving and taking insinuates itself into every corner of colonial and imperial relationships. Take the imposition of western civilization, modernity and western ways of exchange with the universe; all the marks of the cult of giving are present there, deeply scarring the African psyche, as Africans try to come to terms with this mode of being human. Among the many literary portrayals of the psychological import Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart has become a classic. It is an agony to read, for someone who is an African, not only on account of the tragedy implied by the metaphor of falling apart, but in respect of the sense of hopelessness it engenders. Its hero, Okonkwo, comes to embody the fate of colonized people: violence in life as well as in death. As the cult of giving would have it, what the conquerors want they take, including African lives.

Some of the questions this raises are: can we talk about civil society, the state, modernity and development without first going back to this moment of falling apart? What does reconstruction and development (prime concerns of civil society) mean against this background? Can human reconstruction start just anywhere and not at the place where human deconstruction started? Going back to this moment and place is a painful journey. It implies confronting the question of whether the conqueror-vanquished mode of human relations has died with the official demise of apartheid. In his erudite inaugural lecture as Professor of African Studies in the University of Cape Town, Professor Mahmood Mamdani (1998) argues that citizenship, and its entitlements, is still being awarded on the basis of this paradigm throughout post/neo-colonial Africa. Conquerors continue to give and take; the vanquished suffer the indignity and pain of receiving in a perverted mode that hates reciprocity.

An even more pressing question is whether, with the falling apart of things the center also fell or continued to hold. If, as in Yeats’s poem, "The Second Coming" (1977: 401-402), from which the title of Achebe’s novel comes, the center did not hold, then there can be no talk of civil society in Africa, and especially in those parts where nation-building is predicated on welding together erstwhile colonizers and colonized. In fact, in Yeats’s view, the center cannot hold! (my emphasis). If this should be true, what does it mean for the reconstruction of Africa? What is the substance and integrity of what Africa brings to the encounter of civil society? In actual fact, the very possibility of Africans bringing anything of worth to that common ground all but hangs in the balance.

These are some of the troubling questions that must be addressed in any attempt to construct civil society in post-apartheid South Africa. To talk of civil society is to imply that the minimum conditions of human intercourse, viz., giving and receiving, prevail. Hence the tenacity with which the conquerors of southern Africa cling to a cultural stylistic of spurning hospitality while taking what they want, and refusing to listen to anybody while demanding attention from all and sundry. This presents a peculiar liability to the search for civil society. In light of the crucial role that religion played in molding colonial and imperial consciousness and the cult of giving, we may need to trace the roots of the latter in the religious traditions of the West.

That Christianity has profoundly influenced western values is common knowledge. Where giving is concerned one quickly recalls the injunction of one of the founders of the religion, St. Paul, that "it is more blessed to give than to receive" (Acts 20:35). Without having to carry out a systematic investigation of the history and development of this idea in the west we can learn a great deal from the Enlightenment ethic, according to which to be human included assuming responsibility not only for one’s own affairs but for those of one’s fellows (Bosch; 1991). Though it was to be rudely contradicted by the outcomes of progress and modernization thinking (Bloom;1987:34), this tenet is very much alive as the spirit driving social welfare programs, both state and civil.

Where these delicate rules of exchange are lacking or have collapsed any talk of civil society becomes hollow, void both of meaning and substance. The rhythms of honorable giving and receiving are easier to sense when the interconnected nature of life is considered, something that traditional cultures tend to do better than modernized ones. Indeed the latter wax uneasy with the slightest suggestion of a mystical bond between humans and the rest of existence, a discomfort betrayed, among other things, by the unflattering tone in which words such as pantheism (recognition of the divine nature of all things) and monism (recognition of the interconnectedness of all things) are used.

Be this as it may, history attests to the continued human craving for connectedness. More and more the sciences confirm the existence of this principle at the very core of life and its processes (Holbrook 1987). And some of the leading thinkers of our times have long been reminding us that this is the right way to think and act. The message is clear in Pierre Teilhard De Chardin’s argument that love is the force that attracts one thing to another, be it human hearts or molecules in a glass of water(1955:264-72). It comes as a sobering challenge in Ali A Mazrui’s serious suggestion in a UNESCO sponsored study that totemism is one of the most valuable contributions Africa can make to the development of a common world culture (1974:76-81). My submission at this point is that an outlook of respect and friendliness towards nature is a pre-requisite to the development of that cosmopolitan ethic that embraces the whole human family, differences and problems and all, which is crucial to the making of civil society.

In many respects this is what modern ecological philosophers set out to teach. They entreat us to develop an ecological consciousness (Norman 1995: 307-16). Ecological thinking reminds us that because all things are interconnected, no difference can be absolute, thus paving the way for an ethic and consciousness of the broadest and deepest possible commitments and responsibilities to all and everything everywhere. Applied to humanity’s relationship with nature ecological consciousness has the merit of reaching beyond exploitative and dominating orientations toward nature, and encourages empathetic interaction with everything in our universe. Obviously, we are bound to be headed in the right direction as we move away from the suffocating utilitarian and instrumentalist attitude toward nature and into enlightened partnership with it as opposed to lordship over it. Disappointingly, however, nature still occupies the seat of a junior partner; it still has to be cared for and protected, for it is viewed as sitting out there, helpless, vulnerable, waiting to be saved from villainous humanity by heroic humankind. While this ironic realism is understandable on the practical level, theoretically it continues to wallow in the shallow, murky waters of benign dominance. In so far as its vision is one-dimensional (from humans to nature), it still is in the patronage paradigm.

What is needed is that we move forward to what may be called radical ecological consciousness. In this mode stress falls not on giving (caring for the environment), very important, though, this is, but on receiving (dependence on the environment). Going beyond co-operation with nature, itself a progressive step, human beings learn to bear themselves with humility in the face of nature. They sit at its feet to be taught its seemingly familiar yet unfathomable wonders, which may contain keys to intractable human problems. They come to see, or rediscover, that nature is there in its own right, for itself primarily, and only secondarily for mutual co-operation with humankind. They make the sobering discovery that while they need nature, nature does not need them. Perhaps they must not stop there; they must move on in boldness to affirm that human beings are ontologically not caretakers or stewards of anything, but dependants and beneficiaries of the universe. They are caretakers only by default, as a result of their status as naturicides.

This means that humankind needs alternative philosophies of its being in the world, philosophies rid of anthropocentric arrogance and self-deception. Instead of dominance of nature, humankind has to live in mutual indebtedness with nature. But even this is a concession made necessary by human greed and senselessness which has turned nature into an endangered species. Otherwise the equation is that nature owes humans no debt. This is vitally important for an analysis of the social and political situation in post-apartheid South Africa. For just as the endangered status of nature is not incidental to normal ecological development but was caused by humanity, so is the precarious situation of post-colonial Africa an outcome of human agency.

But before we embark on an application of our ecological model to the development of civil society in South Africa, we need to take a further look at the issue of difference, which is really the crux of the matter. This we will do through a critical appreciation of Jacques Derrida’s most helpful discussion of the gift, and by means of a brief excursion into an analysis of Julia Kristeva’s political ethics by Noelle McAfee, and by way of a dip into the pool of African thinking on the subject of alienness.

Since Mauss’s ground-breaking study, The Gift (1954), the notion of the gift has been a useful tool in the hands of French and other philosophers. In the skilful grip of Jacques Derrida it has greatly illuminated a vast area of thought around the intractable subject of "the other". His theory of deconstruction enables Derrida to use the notion of the gift to effect a trenchant analysis of the relation with the other. In a vigorous critique of the kind of giving that takes place in the sort of exchanges Mauss discusses, Derrida rejects the reciprocal obligations and expectations that exchange entails. He is not alone in seeing this as a bondage. Gift giving without expecting anything in return is enjoined by, among others, the Abrahamic faiths. What distinguishes Derrida’s contribution is the rigor of its elaborations. His discussion of hospitality, community and justice seek to pry the gift from the cycle of exchange and transform it into a liberating practice in which no strings are attached to doing good. Justice, he says, has "the structure of the gift", the logic of which is impossibility. He is emphatic that justice is "gift without exchange". A gift, in order to be or to remain a gift, deconstructs itself the moment it is given. The gift, in other words, does not appear as such (Caputo, 1997:141, 143).

At the risk of unfairness to Derrida, a champion of the underdog, I want to submit that the model of giving he proposes, enlightened and progressive as it is, conforms to what I have called the cult of giving. All one has to do to see this is look at his elaboration of the dynamics of hospitality, for instance. For Derrida doing the right thing consists of welcoming the other, the stranger, offering him (sic) hospitality and making him feel at home. Hospitality is "a giving which gives beyond itself" (:112) which, nevertheless, is characterized by a tension that ever exists between the host and the guest. The stranger’s situation makes a demand on the host to which the latter must respond. But in responding by welcoming the stranger and offering him hospitality, the host retains control of his property. For this reason hospitality is still shy of the mark of good giving. As with the gift, genuine hospitality starts happening when hospitality pushes against this limit, this impossibility, and goes beyond itself. And, by any reckoning, Derrida goes beyond many in his daring thought.

However, for all its progressive insights, his model is still plagued by the sweet demon of giving. Even where self is destabilized and decentered, the rhetoric of one-sided giving is as eloquent as ever. Simply to locate correctness in giving in excess, in generosity outdoing itself, may address the problem of reciprocity but it totally fails to even raise the issue of receiving. The motivation may be right: excess in giving cancels the demonic power of selfish calculation in social relations. But the method is inadequate or insufficient: one-way giving may weaken or even destroy the force of exchange, but it cannot do away with the power of the hand that gives. To the contrary, it strengthens it. It seems that the albatross of necessity that Derrida, a rebellious child of the European Enlightenment, is fleeing from has to be faced head-on.

It is in moments like these, at the height of the most strident of its self criticism that western thought succumbs to the cultural weight of the obsession with autonomy. Even in the munition house of deconstruction, where the praises of heteronomy are religiously sung, the little ghost of autonomy rears its troubled head. It dons and doffs different crowns, of course, as dictated by the occasion. To what, if not to the eerie visitations of this shade, is the stridence against reciprocity to be attributed? Why is the empirical other always a stranger and not a brother or, worse still, why is he a brother to the internal other (dark side) rather than the celebrated self? I am addressing the problem of intimacy, which western thought, no doubt burdened with imperial, even racist, ideologies, is often clumsy with. However, brotherhood or sisterhood poses no threat to alterity. Blood ties as models of structures of giving must not be feared beyond reason, for they too can be deconstructed without losing their usefulness. Fictions of kinship, going a little beyond friendship, yet retaining their voluntary roots, seem fraught with analytic potential. Later we shall explore some ways in which Africans handle the issue of alienness as we continue to search for ways to go beyond Derrida. For now let us see how Julia Kristeva can assist us in this quest.

Where does this stranger come from? Kristeva analyses this in terms of the concept of "abjection", a word which means "expel". The child comes into being by a process which involves expulsion. The mother is expelled (abjected) in order that the child may emerge as a self. But in the same act the child expels itself. "I expel myself", says Kristeva, "I spit myself out. I abject myself within the same motion through which `I’ claim to establish myself." But this is a second stage or second repression. Before this the child is part of undifferentiated being, which Kristeva calls the chora. The break with the chora represents a primary repression which is necessary for the child’s self-creation.

Later in its life the child will experience the return of the abjected when it appears as a threat that might swallow the self back into the mother’s body, where all difference and subjectivity stands to be lost. It is this strangeness and the threat of reversion to undifferentiated being that, when projected upon empirical strangers, awakens primal fears and anxieties.

Simplified to caricature level, it may be said that the return of the abject confronts us as something uncanny, as a stranger within. The question is, as McAfee puts it: "Is it possible or even desirable to eradicate the abject character of foreigners—that is to eradicate absolute difference?" Going beyond Freud, Kristeva answers no to both. For the uncanny is not only a bi-product of repression; rather it is itself a factor in the constitution of the self. On the personal level we should at least learn to live with and respect the stranger within us. However, where empirical strangers are concerned the borderline between personal and public is crossed. Hence the solution cannot be found in psychoanalysis. Political solutions with legislation and related mechanisms have to be found.

McAfee identifies a contradiction in Kristeva’s solution. "On the one hand, Kristeva claims it is possible to become reconciled with oneself, but on the other hand, she wants to work toward an ethics of respect for the irreconcilable". She thinks further that Kristeva is "looking for a psychoanalytic solution to an ontological problem". This is where McAfee turns to Heidegger. She finds a lead in his notion of "authenticity" according to which one must become one’s own self, rather than follow the crowd. But since the self is already split by virtue of part of it being hidden from itself, Heidegger’s solution proves untenable. In the final analysis, the answer is to be found, again with Kristeva, in the subversion of the unitary self. Echoing Tzvetan Todorov’s (1987:249) notion of the "exile", Kristeva sees salvation as flowing from everyone coming to a realization that we all are foreigners, not only to one another, but to ourselves as well.

It is important to note that while Kristeva manages to make some correctives to Freud, she does not challenge the notion of undifferentiated being from which the child emerges in the process of differentiation. Separation is still the goal in self-creation. As we have seen in the case of Derrida, this is the beginning of the problem of autonomy, and although Kristeva problematizes the process of the emergence of the self, she does not quite get rid of the category of the Separate.

At this point Jessica Benjamin’s critique of the "overvaluation of separation" in philosophical and psychoanalytic analyses of the development of the self should come to the rescue. She expounds intersubjective theory in a way that allows us to see uncertainty, contradiction and paradox not as the ogres that the self must always strive to flee, but as intrinsic to its very structure and development. Instead of being "a closed system" that must vie with other such systems for assertion of omnipotence and achievement of dominance, the individual is conceived of as existing in a relationship of constant tension "between assertion of self and recognition of other". Thus confrontation with otherness becomes less of polarization and more of "the simultaneous process of transforming and being transformed by the other". Two points are pertinent to our concern with giving and receiving. First, just as serious an encounter with oneself is essential for a respectful encounter with others, so is serious encounter with otherness crucial to self-knowledge and development. Second, an understanding of self that is not predicated on the centrality of separation lessens, if not eradicates, the fear of receiving that is so deeply embedded in the western psyche.

From the perspective of African religious and philosophical thought, to be human is to run the full course of life as delineated by the life cycle: to receive life, live life, transmit life and, as ancestor, protect life (Kwenda 1996:12-13). All this is made possible by marriage. Since the majority of African people are exogamous, otherness or difference is found at the very core of what it means to be human. Legitimate, auspicious self-perpetuation, both for the individual and the group, is dependent on fertility from outside (Kwenda, Mndende, Stonier 1997:36-38). Admittedly, the abhorrence with which incest is regarded by exogamous African societies may be interpreted as an expression of male chauvinism (Hammond-Tooke 1989:99-100). On the other hand , it can shed an immense amount of light on the sensitive issue of difference. It is through the encounter with otherness in marriage that either spouse is rid of the primordial darkness of sexual ignorance. At a deeper spiritual level, the lobola cattle that are given to the wife-givers by the wife-receivers ideally are ancestral cattle, that is, beasts that have been dedicated to the family ancestors (Hunter 1936:192). This exchange brings together a congeries of different spirit worlds, shoring up difference as the fundamental condition for auspicious reproduction of human life. Moreover, in so far as it is driven by what Suzette Heald (1990:387), discussing the respect and distance which regulates the relationship between the son-in-law and the mother-in-law, rightly terms "the asymmetric gift of life", it contains the seeds of its own permanent interruption.

Another area where alienness plays a crucial role is healing. For the traditional healer, power comes from association with a variety of otherness, including the spirit world, other people, non-clan ancestors, other species (animals, vegetation). In funeral rituals outsiders such as sons-in-law, daughters-in-law and ritual friends play critical roles (Gelfand 1977:41). Finally the constitution of chiefship and the inauguration of a chief are only possible through complex symbolic incorporations of otherness. All this points to the complexity of African understandings of self and other. If anything, the main thrust is that otherness is embraced as a matter of survival and well-being.

We saw above that the place to start thinking about civil society is the place where things fell apart for African people, where the continent lost its innocence. Our first move must be to take stock of history. We learn that the situation in which Africa finds itself did not just happen; it was brought about by imperialists and colonialists in a violent praxis which included in its core a mission to civilize the people of Africa. Conquest and patronage allowed giving to take the form of imposition and taking to displace receiving. What was imposed were the blessings of the bitter pill of modernity blessings because of the welcome wonders of science and technology, bitter because while Europe entered modernity as liberation from moribund and autocratic forces in the time of the Enlightenment (Serequeberhan 1998:440), Africa suffered it as already a possession of European conquerors and thus as terror and humiliation. Civil society could never mean the same thing in the two contexts.

To press this issue further, we must ask about the "aboutness" of civil society. What is the problem? There is much flogging of the Trojan horse of the state in debates about civil society. But if we are right in seeing the neo-colonial state in Africa as in the first instance, guilty by association, if not by default, that is, as an appendage and pawn of imperial powers, can we then proceed to admit it as a legitimate first accused, or a reliable witness, even? There appears to be some wool here that when it gets in our eyes gives us "civil-vision", that is, seeing things as they are refracted by the mirror of dominant ideology; and when it gets in our mouths we get "civil-talk", what James C. Scott (1990:4) calls "speaking the lines and making the gestures he knows are expected of him".

Which is where I think the search must be directed. Take a word such as "globalization". Should we not be wary of transitive verbs without objects and nouns that are neither subject nor object? Like all euphemisms they conceal and obscure (:52-55) subjectivity (agency) and objects (victims)—these are often the casualties. In the idiom of this paper, the nature of giving and receiving is masked. As if this is not enough, it turns out that the masking itself is as violent as the praxis it seeks to conceal. If we were to ask: globalization of what? Who globalizes (gives) what to whom (recipients)? we would end up either immensely frustrated or greatly agitated: frustrated if the concealing act kept wrapping on endless folds, agitated if we are lucky and we not only get a glimpse of the truth but actually get someone to accept responsibility for the situation. If the expansion of Euro-America in naked imperialism aimed at creating "little Europes" (Serequeberhan : 235) was terror and humiliation to Africa, one can only contemplate in fear and trembling the aftermath of the masked giving that takes the dubious appellation of "globalization". When we take this to the place in Africa where things fell apart, one question arises with suffocating urgency. Is this another enslavement?

Wrapped up as it is with modernity, how can the concept of civil society commend itself to an Africa in which things fell apart in "the Age of Europe" (West 1993:5) and are likely to fall apart again in the age of globalization? If what we are witnessing is indeed a mutation of the Age of Europe, then we can without hesitation forecast more rather than less humiliation and terrorization of Africa and other parts of the world that fall into its league. How do South Africans speak about civil society in such a context? To start with, the country presents a particularly complicated case as it embodies a significant bit of Europe. In the search for a discourse that atones for rather than deepens the wound of Africa’s humiliation and pain, can the ideology of civil society be a help or a hindrance? Much will depend not so much on the rhetoric as on its content. Civil society is meaningless as long as the violence endemic to the modernizing (civilizing) project which continues to humiliate and terrorize Africans is not effectively addressed. What is the way forward?

Indications of possible solutions consist, as suggested above, in radical transcendence of difference in a move that approximates conversion. A move that starts with a profound encounter with one’s own stranger within, thereby opening a window through which the empirical stranger next door or from the other side of town can be experienced in their integrity. Such a window swung open on the South African scene in the form of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Some people collected the courage to take healing peeps at otherness through it. Some were understandably sceptical. Those who saw it as something to scoff at paraded the turmoil that continues to rage within.

On the other hand, there are those perpetrators who after they were (for)given did not know how to accept forgiveness. It is not very clear why they found it hard to accept the offer of forgiveness. Maybe they simply were overwhelmed by the intensity of the emotionally charged prospect. Or could it be that as members of a culture and history that is accustomed to take what they want they did not know how to receive what is freely given? These issues can be addressed on the national level through the provision for the development of values in the educational system and in other forums of a voluntary nature, from the home to churches, clubs and organizations of various sorts. Hopefully, we can meet with some success.

What Antjie Krog (1998:8) says about the South African situation may be true of the slavery case: "It remains one of the most baffling elements of the majority of the country’s population , that they always demand much less than what the minority expects. The other amazing fact is that this same minority always reacts as if the ultimate sacrifice has been demanded; that the final trenches must be dug." At face value, the African demand for reparation for slavery may appear just as one more encouragement for Europeans to indulge further in the cult of giving; in actual fact it is a way of affording them a chance to receive in the form of listening and hearing how this hurt stands in the way of genuine encounter with African people on the continent and in the diaspora. Reparation would give Europeans an opportunity to convert the original act of taking to one of receiving. At that point reconciliation would occur.

It would be extremely myopic to limit the scope and range of these experiments and their outcomes to South Africa and the continent. Lessons can be learnt and models adopted abroad that originate locally. After all the terror of modernity is a global reality. The dark side of human consciousness about which Kristeva, among others, reminds us is not to be taken lightly. History and the day’s news are ever flashing warnings to this effect. All the more reason to wake up to the realization that no single tradition, cultural, religious, intellectual and even economic, can save the world today, much less in the future. Consequently, only policies, debates, and discourses that are meaningfully informed by the best of what the human race as a whole has to offer might hold some promise for the world, and certainly for Africa. This should be a major focus on the agenda of the awaited African Renaissance. Then civil society as a human society can come into being.

A radical encounter with nature may be a critical starting point, affording human beings a more realistic estimation of humanity and its place in the scheme of things in the world, a place defined by an ethic of soberness regarding human capabilities and the species’ survivability. This means giving up the savior complexes implied in the globalization of easy resort to military solutions, in favor of participation in the seesaw of giving and receiving that characterizes the natural flow of life. I realize that this may go against the grain for people of the technological age, who pride themselves not only on their ability to take care of things but to create them. But again, experience shows us that there does not seem to be a correlation between technological advancement and social and moral well-being. In fact uncritical application of mechanistic thinking to social relations can have detrimental consequences (Adas 1989:345-418, passim).

Let me end by relating a short biographical story which occurred one day, back in the 1980s, when I was working for a non-governmental organization (NGO) which specialized in disaster relief and community development projects in Zimbabwe. An American colleague and I had flown to a remote community near the country’s border with Mozambique to see some projects. Two years of drought had hit the area hard, causing great hardship to the people there. It was most fulfilling to be able to give the gifts of food and water to the community through our relief work and even to provide some development components which included child care, literacy and skills training.

At the end of our visit, my friend and I were invited home by an elderly woman in her sixties, who had just learnt to write. She wanted to show us her success. After excitedly viewing her work we stood up to go, but she motioned for us to sit down while she disappeared behind her house and into the dry bush. My friend was visibly worried because there was a dusk to dawn curfew on small aircraft in the country at that time, and time was running out. After a while our host reappeared holding in her hand two dried pods of baobab fruit. She gracefully laid them before us. "I couldn’t let you go empty handed", she explained with a beautiful smile.

1. The phrase "rainbow nation" has become a popular catchword for a model of nation-building on the basis of unity in diversity expounded by Desmond Tutu, see The Rainbow People of God (London: Bantam Books, 1995).

2. I am aware of the philosophical problems that this position raises but since they will be dealt with below, in the section on Derrida and his discussion of the gift, I shall not deal with them here.

3. For a novelist’s treatment of this optimistic view see Ayi Kwei Armah, The Healers (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1978.)

4. In historical perspective the picture is more complex, displaying shifts between anthropocentric and what we might call eco-centric emphases. See, for instance, the discussion of environmental history by David Arnold, The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture and European Expansion (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996).

5. It may seem contradictory that those who are tired of unequal receiving should be bound by this commandment, too. Women, as a female colleague was quick to remind me, will see this as reinforcement of the role of passive receptacle they traditionally have had to play. The difference, however, is that this receiving will be new in so far as it will be based on the condition of reciprocity, as well as on the mutual exercise of wisdom in discerning when to give or receive what, how and so on.

6. It is not necessary to invoke the radical spirituality of Pagan Environmentalism to take the human-nature relationship seriously (For a brief yet informative treatment of Pagan Environmentalism see Bron Taylor, "Resacralizing Earth: Pagan Environmentalism and the Restoration of Turtle Island", in David Chidester and Edward T. Linenthal, eds., American Sacred Space (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 97-151. John M. Mackenzie, "The Natural World and the European Appropriation of Nature," in Kaarsholm Preben, ed., Cultural Struggle and Development in Southern Africa (Harare: Baobab Books; London: James Currey and Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1991), 13-31, contextualizes some of the issues and perspectives in southern Africa.

7. In response to a question I put to him during his lecture, "Forgiving the Unforgivable" which he delivered at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town on Monday, 10 August, 1998 Prof. Derrida was emphatic that he pays as much attention to receiving as he does to giving. But I still insist that both in this particular lecture and in his other writings, "receiving" only arises incidentally as a problem of giving and not as something that may be positive in itself. For instance, where he enjoins us to ". . . know how to give, know what you want and want to say when you give, know what you intend to give" (quoted in Caputo op. cit. 146) I am not aware of an equivalent injunction to know how to receive.

8. In Kelly Oliver, ed., Ethics, Politics and Difference in Julia Kristeva’s Writing (New York: Routledge, 1993).

9. Many African myths of origin feature this strategy of welding together strangers into viable polities. The power of fictive kinship lay not so much in the people’s belief in the myth (indeed people joke about these) but in its having come into existence and the undergirding history. Karen McCarthy Brown relates how in Haiti slaves who had sailed on the same ship from Africa developed such strong kinship ties that marriage between them would have amounted to incest. "Afro-Caribbean Spirituality: A Haitian Case Study." In Healing and Restoring: Medicine and Health in the World’s Religious Traditions, ed. Sullivan, Lawrence (New York: McMillan, 1989), 255-85.

10. This is the formula used by the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act No. 34 of 1995. Statutes of the Republic of South Africa to define and delimit the sort of human rights violations the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was charged to deal with.

11. Inclusive of overseas extensions of Europe.

12. Thabo Mbeki, in his now famous, "I am an African" speech (1998) expounds in rich poetic cadences a complex definition of "African".

13. As used in South Africa to include Africans, "Coloreds" and Indians.

14. The plurality and diversity of cultures is only one of many challenges the ANC (African National Congress) led Government of National Unity (GNU) in South Africa is faced with. Presently Parliament is debating the possibility of establishing a Commission for the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Communities (Randall 1998), to spearhead work in this area of nation-building.