After the first democratic elections in South Africa in 1994, while we were still dancing in the streets, celebrating our liberation from apartheid and rejoicing in our freedom from the most virulent system of entrenched differences in the world, we were almost immediately re-colonized by global market forces beyond our control. Having been divided by apartheid, we were suddenly homogenized under the sign of globalization.

In reflecting on that re-colonization by the global market, South African President Thabo Mbeki has used explicitly religious language—metaphorical, but also critical—in wrestling with this new terrain on which the struggle continues. In a speech delivered in September 1998, for example, President Mbeki adamantly rejected the incorporation of South Africa into the global religion of the market. "We must be at the forefront," he urged, "of challenging the notion of `the market’ as the modern god, a supernatural phenomenon to whose dictates everything human must bow in a spirit of powerlessness." At a conference organized by the editors of this volume in early 1999, President Mbeki elaborated on the religious terms of engagement through which the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and U.S. President Bill Clinton had urged him to recite what he referred to as the "new catechism"—democracy, human rights, market economy, free trade, relaxed exchange controls, and open boundaries for the flow of global capital—as a "prayer of hope for the future that will only produce enormous poverty." In this recognition, Thabo Mbeki indicated that the economic, social, and political challenges facing South Africa require playing the only game in town while maintaining human integrity. His religious language—the god of the market, the new catechism, the prayer of hope for the future—suggested that he was also aware that these challenges raised profound questions about what it means to be human in a human society.

By the end of the twentieth century, according to many commentators, globalization had produced vast changes in the organization of the world economy. As a general term, globalization represented significant shifts—from production to consumption, from industry to information, from national interests to the interests of transnational corporations, and so on—all of which culminated in the emergence of the victorious, notorious "new world order." From this global perspective, human beings had also changed, becoming consumers of information in an economy of knowledge, goods and services driven by global market forces. The challenge of being human in the world, therefore, had increasingly become synthesized, standardized and homogenized within the terms and conditions of a global market economy.

Is that a true story? From a variety of perspectives, this story of globalization has been challenged. Postmodernists, postcolonialists, material feminists, religious Marxists, and many others have tried to develop alternative terms for gaining critical leverage against this pervasive narrative of globalization. At the same time, on the ground, people all over the world have been involved in local initiatives in fashioning alternative accounts of the world, thereby enacting creative interventions in the face of globalization. Often, these interventions have been explicitly religious, whether seeking to recover the indigenous integrity of a local religion or to produce a local, mixed, or hybrid version of a global religion. In these religious initiatives, people are not merely consumers of religious signs, symbols and images; they are also acting as producers of knowledge. At the local level, therefore, religion can represent a diverse array of resources and strategies for producing alternative meanings for being human.

In this volume, the authors undertake a radical recovery of the term "religion" as both a critical and creative entry into the challenges posed by local transitions and globalizing forces at the beginning of the 21st century. In the process of dealing with these enormous challenges, they enter the field of possibilities signaled by civil society, not in the abstract, but in and through the reality of race and space, discourse and practice, gender and women’s organizations, law and values, patronage and reciprocity, and other features of a changing South African landscape. In different ways, the authors think through the theory and practice of civil society for a new South Africa. Simultaneously global and local, their deliberations contribute to an ongoing conversation about the potential and limits of civil society that is currently taking place not only in South Africa, but also in other transitional societies all over the world. On the strength of this book, we must hope and trust that those conversations will continue.

During 2000, the Republic of South Africa formally adopted a new national motto—Diverse peoples unite!"—that appeared to resolve the question of sameness and difference at the level of public relations. This book engages the complex, shifting dilemma of sameness and difference at a more profound level that goes to the heart of the production of human identity, meaning and power in public life. Without pretending to resolve the question of sameness and difference, this book seeks to make a significant contribution to helping us think through exactly what is at stake. In a transitional South Africa and a transitional world, we need to be clear about what is at stake.

University of Cape Town

August 2000