INTRODUCTION
Sameness—Difference: These are among the most common words in the lexicon of post-colonial, post-modern, and post-feminist theories. They have arisen from the dynamics of the twentieth century to give expression to a renewed interest in the local, the particular, the Other. They help define the present intellectual landscape.
In South Africa, the terms of sameness and difference have long been of particular importance. Our past policies under the name of apartheid (the word itself representing an apotheosis of difference), and our present initiatives under the theme of nation-building, resonate with themes of sameness and difference. The experience which accompanies these themes is that of profound pain, suffering, struggle and hope. The theoretical and practical questions of sameness and difference, therefore, could not be more pertinent for us. Yet not only for us.
The collapse of the communist experiments in Eastern Europe, the rising hegemony of neo-liberal economics, the world-wide spread of influential information technologies and entertainment media, and the image of a global village in which we all look the same in some ways, and yet all appear different to each other in other ways—all of this has changed also the world we inhabit irrevocably. It has changed the ethos of the world we inhabit.
The "sameness" of the grand social visions of the twentieth century, whether of the left, the center or the right, are aimed either at common denominator societies or at the imposition of one scheme of things upon everyone. The notion of the human being as possessing a universal "essence," which could be read into and out of every society, governed the social sciences and the popular imagination of liberal democracies. We are much more aware now, if we were not before, that this supposedly universal human being is in fact an ideological metaphor for a particular human being: the one who feels, thinks and acts as if he (usually) is the measure of all other human beings by virtue of his or her education, affluence, sophistication and, as is all too often the case, the color of skin. This is the cultural, theoretical and political construct of those who possess power and wealth. As this construct has been exposed for all to see, so too the anthropology that underlies it has been undermined. There is no such thing, as "man" in general, Foucault has reminded us, only particular men and women. And children.
The vision of the "universal man" had its point. It was not mere ideology, that is, mystification. It stood against the terrible wars of Europe which were driven by differences, even among those who claimed the same sacred authority. It projected a world free of the hate, enmity, violence and destruction that difference has the potential to wreak. At the same time it was an ideology, a projection of the self-image of the bourgeois man (not much the woman). This projection carried with it, both in its defence and in those who attacked it, a desire for control of the wilful, irrational, mad world we inhabit. That desire, in turn, took the form of a grand analysis of society and grand schemes for repairing and directing society.
Unfortunately for such visions, schemes and theories, the differences that mark human beings have been neither watered down nor have they withered away in the face of appeals either to Reason or History. They have simmered along under the hegemony of harmony to break forth again and again against the predictions of the earlier social science theories which sought to set them aside.
1 In consequence, we are forced again into a new appreciation of difference.2The current attention we pay to identities and particularities, to micro-social realities rather than (or at least in parallel to) macro-social "grand narratives"—another characteristic term in the contemporary social analytical lexicon—is therefore unsurprising. The earlier sweeping historical schemes which marked the twentieth century have proven fragile, both practically and theoretically. As this fragility has altered previous certainties; so too an industry of books and journal essays has tried to unpack what is happening to us in this "post-modern," "post-colonial" period.
About the only consensus we can determine in the breakdown of the certainties that governed the grand narratives of the past, is that noone quite knows where we are going, or how we will get there. Doom and gloom, euphoria and cheer, alternate with each other, interplay with each other, as we contemplate our various particular presents and future hopes. This, one may say, is with few exceptions not the beginning of a century with high hope, as might have been the case for many at the turn of the previous century. Even those who might be expected to be crowing of their triumph have grown fearful. This is perhaps most poignantly and elegantly evident in the seminal essay titled "The Capitalist Threat," by George Soros,
3 doyen of the speculators who have given rise to the term "financial capital" as a mark of our time.The "sameness" envisaged by the grand narratives of history of the past was predicated in large measure on either of two pictures. One was of the contented bourgeois, nuclear family in a busy commercial and industrial megalopolis or in a romantic rural town. The other was of a courageous worker marching in solidarity with other workers the world over. Each projected a particular view of the "true" nature of the human being. Between these two great anthropologies of the age crept the remaining people of the earth, waiting to be drawn into one or other side of the equation, mostly seen to be backward in their politics or in their economies. "Progress" was the ideology of the era. All that was at stake was who would define the character of the progressive realization of human aspirations, and who would thus lead the masses into a better world. Such was the stuff of the social sciences, at least until these odd certainties began to crumble in the wake of the complexity of human life and the methodological weakness of the scientific paradigms that were in place.
Until then, the "sameness" which human beings were supposed to represent reigned supreme, and "difference" was either the bastion of conservatism or the refuge of elites. Indeed, difference was precisely the philosophical, theological and practical basis of that tragic, terrible experiment which gave the world the word "apartheid." It stressed the particular, the black particular, and separated it out from every other particular—except one: the need for white unity as a sameness which would entrench a hold on the political economy of South Africa, was strong, regardless of the ethnic origins of "whites."
4 Thus it was white South Africans who arrived at a forced compromise between the British and the Boers in the formation of the ironically named "Union of South Africa"—ironic, because it was a racially defined white unity in the face of a threat defined as "the Native problem." The "natives" themselves were drawn into this dispensation by means of an opposing construction, an ethnically defined politics of division, predicated upon a need for their labor but not for them.That is our heritage. We have now arrived at the point where the construction of a new nation, a democratic society, is the crucial task of our time. A new irony has arisen. We badly need to find a broader national "sameness" in attacking this legacy of the degenerative and damaging framework of difference which was apartheid. Precisely at this time, the world around is rediscovering difference and trumpeting its cause.
We have come to the point of establishing our first truly democratic nation just when the old hegemonies which defined the nineteenth and twentieth century are breaking up, and the ideological wallpaper that was plastered over deep social differences in myriad parts of the world is being torn down, to reveal . . . what: A monster? The source of new local vitalities? The return of ancient reactionary traditions? The recovery of much-needed resources in tradition and context for regenerating value and virtue? The rise of hydra-headed enthusiasms against the spiritual barrenness of Enlightenment rationalities? The reinsertion of deep-rooted local wisdoms?
These questions of sameness and difference permeate our own attempt in South Africa to find new arrangements in living with each other in a whole, healed and just world. We enter this task aware of our location in a wider world: Africa in the first instance, the international community generally in the second. Many wonder where the resources to carry out the task will be found. As elsewhere in the last decade and a half, some have suggested that our hopes lie not in the political realm of large-scale conglomerations of power, nor in the economic realm of equally large-scale conglomerates of industry, commerce and finance, but in the intimate spheres, the human lifeworld arenas, of civil society. The concept of civil society has also been reborn in the changes of the last fifteen years.
The rise of the notion of civil society in the nineteen eighties and nineties was marked by the plethora of research and publications that entered public debate in the academy, in the world of politicians and social engineers, and among activists in countries whose old systems of rule by oligarchies, dictators and political elites had crumbled or were crumbling. South Africa too has had its debates on the importance of civil society.
The particular character of the South African debate has been dominated by one question in particular: Will the profound mix of civil society organizations which played such a key role in challenging the apartheid state in its last twenty years gain in strength, or will it be weakened by the establishment of a more representative government seeking a centrally led program of reconstruction? The question has a material basis as well. Sympathetic governments, churches, trades unions and the like externally funded much of the work of civil society organizations against apartheid. Would this funding continue (it has in fact been drastically cut back or redirected to the new state)? And if not, would the new state take over some of that responsibility in making available some funds with no strings attached? In short, would the new state see a stronger civil society as a key partner or see it as a competitor?
Hermien Kotze, writing in a publication on the possibilities of creating "action space" in contemporary society,
5 presents a fairly widespread view among non-governmental organizations that the answer to this question is not encouraging for civil society. The jury is still out. At the same time, citizens—which for the first time now also means all black South Africans—are simply going ahead in many places in organizing themselves. In this sense, a civil society movement which is dependent neither on the state nor on external funds generally is putting down roots here and there. How strong it will become depends on many things; not least, perhaps, on the extent to which religious bodies and institutions recognize their own responsibilities at the grassroots level for encouraging and strengthening the capacities necessary for the exercise of citizenship and thus for the growth of civil society.The question of civil society has not escaped religious thinkers either. Though not a great deal has been written about civil society by theologians and religious analysts as yet, at least one book attempted to capture the debate. This was a collection of essays on Religion and the Reconstruction of Civil Society,
6 arising from the founding congress of the South African Academy of Religion in 1994, the year in which South Africa’s first democratic elections were held. Twenty-one essays by a good representation of religious academics make up the collection. They examine aspects of religious plurality, religion and reconstruction, civil society and theology, civil society and sacred texts. Very few of them, however, problematize the concept of civil society as such, either generally or in relation to religion. The first essay in this present book, by James Cochrane, attempts to do both, thus setting the scene for those that follow.Equally notable about the earlier collection from 1994 is the fact that only two of the essays are by black South Africans. This in itself points to an issue raised by the first chapter in this volume, namely, the contested character of the concept of civil society in relation to Africa’s experience of the "civilizing" mission of the colonial powers. It also raises the question about the extent to which the idea of civil society finds purchase in South Africa. Whose concern is it? And why? The point cannot be lost on the reader of this volume that it too suffers from a lack of representivity in this respect. It is an important issue, especially in South Africa where academic discourse has for so long been dominated by the concepts, theoretical frameworks and agendas of Westerners and Northerners. This volume in itself, by virtue of its own weakness in this respect, raises the issue once again. It is one, which currently challenges the very foundations of the academic and intellectual enterprise in South Africa.
7No apologia can be made for that fact. All that can be said is that a small, diverse group of thinkers gathered to debate the resources we might have in South Africa for the development or reconstruction of civil society in a time of transition, some five to six years after the establishment of a constitutional democracy, as part of the entrenching of the democratic vision this new social agreement proclaims. Initially the group was formed at the University of Natal, and some contributors to this volume are from that institution. Subsequently, others were drawn in from the three Western Cape universities, namely, the University of Cape Town (UCT), the University of the Western Cape, and Stellenbosch University.
The colloquia were held over nine months, more or less on a monthly basis. The papers presented here are the result. These were busy people, all with innumerable energies sapping demands made upon them by others, both locally and nationally, in government and out, to respond to the needs of building the institutions and sharpening the processes which would allow our new democracy to succeed. That they managed to continue their participation in the colloquium and produce a final draft of their papers is a miracle, for which we wish here to express our warm gratitude.
This small group could easily, and with profit, have been expanded in numerous ways. Indeed, a number of interested people whom we had approached finally had to withdraw as a result of other demands upon them. The final group is a talented collection of individuals, all of whom are known widely and respected in their particular fields. They represent, obviously, only a selection of perspectives and wisdom on the possibilities of civil society in South Africa. The book, similarly contains only a small collection of the many possible contributions that might have been made, and these contributions touch on only a handful of the many themes that one might explore with respect to a complex set of theoretical and practical issues to do with civil society, religion and philosophy.
This is, then, an eclectic work. It is produced by people from different disciplines and traditions who focused on whatever particular research interests had been driving them which might illuminate the overarching question. This is both its strength and its weakness. It does not offer a definitive response to the question of what resources might be available to us, and by what frameworks of thinking and ethical claims civil society might be grown and entrenched. It can only be a stimulus to that question, a probing of what at first glance may seem an odd assemblage of ideas and disciplines.
It is precisely this disparate set of thoughts, based on a range of experiences and disciplines which are not always aware of each other, which challenges the idea of any grand image of sameness to bind the new nation. It is also this eccentricity which underlines the need to pay attention to differences, be they expressed in political, economic, religious, cultural, psychological or other form. In fact, the gradual clarification of the overall theme of this project arose as members of the colloquium began to realize that difference marked our own meeting in the way in which we defined issues and the focus of our enquiries. Yet we met because we were interested in collaboration, in moving towards some kind of sameness that would bind and heal a deeply damaged and divided society. A logic to our deliberations emerged organically.
After James Cochrane’s opening essay, the remaining material was organized into two sections. Part I dealt with the "structuring and restructuring of civil society," incorporating a series of reflections arising from the South African experience on the possible meaning of civil society, and the potential resources philosophy and religion may have to offer in the building of civil society. In the process of these reflections, the concept of civil society itself is again problematized from a variety of points of view.
Where else to begin but around the question of race and racism? This is a quintessentially South African problem. Don Foster, a social psychologist, responds to this question by unpacking the relationships between race and the construction of space in society. Unless we deal with the way in which spatial arrangements in our country have expressed racist configurations of place, we will not even begin to deal with the reality of the bifurcated state produced by colonial politics.
8 The racial division between urban and rural, between "white" suburb and "black" township, is both a geographical concretization of a distinction between the sphere of freedom and the sphere of subjugation, and a material and discursive barrier to the construction of a civil society. In this respect, Foster "spatializes" values in regard to both racism and androcentrism, defining the relevant spaces to be international, national, urban, local or immediate, and psychological. Paying attention to these spatialized contexts of value-formation, Foster undercuts idealized notions of civil society. These preliminary descriptions offer him the opportunity to redefine the contexts within which the hope for civil society must take root if it is to be capable of dealing with differences—such as those of race and gender—in ways which are theoretically adequate and practically efficacious.The discursive aspects of identity and difference around racial designations of the self and the other form the focus of the essay by Robin Petersen. The terms by which racialized categories of identity have been constructed in the colonial and apartheid past have their parallels in counter-categorical claims, one of which—"non-racialism"—has found its way into our new constitution. Petersen unpacks the complex and painful history of the struggle around these issues by paying attention to the language that has been used by proponents and opponents of one or other view of race and racism. What does "blackness," or "African-ness," or "non-racialism," for example, mean in our new context? How are these terms to be understood historically? What do they reveal about our political, material and cultural differences? What do they offer in arriving at some common South African identity? These questions take us to core issues of the valuing and valuation of human beings, and thus to the question of what potential there may be for finding new descriptions of difference and sameness which are constructive rather than destructive to the building of a new society.
The Constitution we have put in place, perhaps more than any existing constitution in the world, pays attention to other categories of difference than race. Gender, of course, is one of these, and gender struggles have been almost as much a part of our recent history as any other, both among black and white South Africans. Consequently, the new political dispensation in South Africa has seen a particularly strong consciousness of gender constructions of sameness and difference, both in discourse and in political and economic systems. The negotiations which brought about the settlement for democracy in South Africa and ended the formal period of apartheid rule were themselves constructed with the issue very much in mind. Every participating stakeholder in those negotiations was required to bring a team of people in which at least half had to be women. This is probably unprecedented in world politics.
It is entirely appropriate, therefore, to ask just how deeply rooted is this shift and, how far it has gone in the years since those negotiations took place. This is the task undertaken by Amanda Gouws and Shireen Hassim in their contribution to this volume. They pay particular attention to feminist perspectives on civil society and women as political agents, to changes within the women’s movement in South Africa, and to the question of whether or not that movement has been "demobilized" through the incorporation of women into government and other sectors of society where their solidarity is more difficult to embody.
Gouws and Hassim work with a different theoretical conception of civil society than that which Cochrane champions in his introductory essay, and this is worth noting here. They define civil society in such a way as to implicate the concept irrevocably within a tradition which separates the public from the private, which regards the public sphere as that of a gendered, male civil society, and the private sphere as the gendered, female realm of personal life. It is not hard to see why this view of civil society helps to unpack the points they make about the role of women in the public sphere, in particular, the historical exclusion of women from the public sphere. The alternative view on civil society which Cochrane presents does not adopt the distinction between public and private in the first place, a distinction which without doubt is linked to a particular historical conception of civil society in the male, bourgeois world of the industrial revolution. These theoretical distinctions within this one volume offer to the reader, therefore, additional resources for exploring the potential of the concept of civil society itself, particularly in relation to the history of Africa and South Africa.
The final chapter in Part I takes up the issue of the relationship between what is basically a liberal democratic constitution by which political life in South Africa is now governed, and those sets of values we may deem "religious." There is no necessary harmony between religious values and those values which the Constitution proclaims and defends. The tension generated by an instrument which is supposed to represent a general, plural, secular public set of values, and the corporate foundations of value found through membership and belief in a particular religious tradition, can be the basis for much conflict or at least for a practical distancing of local communities from public claims. This suggests that there is a great deal of potential in this tension for undermining that consensual framework of values upon which civil society rests. Equally, it suggests that an understanding of civil society which incorporates such differences and takes seriously their enriching possibilities might be vital.
Thus it is that Ebrahim Moosa takes up the tensions between legal and religious values in relation to the new South African constitution. In so doing, he opens up the more general question of the relationship between law and religion under "modern" conditions, and between religion and the state as a result. His essay is an attempt to rethink the place of religion and of religious normative claims in relation to the secular assumptions which govern the making of public policy. Not surprisingly, he locates his argument also at the level of metaphysics and the nature of "rights." This turn to the legal parameters of any conception of civil society echoes a theme begun in Foster’s essay at the beginning of Part I, and leads us into the next set of themes.
Part II demonstrates the eclectic character of this volume. Here a number of specific investigations into very particular aspects of civil society, each tries to uncover and unpack insights and make suggestions which may enrich our search for a whole and healthy society. Accordingly, we speak of these essays as "exploring normative claims and interests" which arise from reflections on, or may contribute to an understanding of, civil society.
The first of these, Martin Prozesky’s pursuit of "ethical creativity," takes up the potential of a process philosophy view of the world to make a contribution to the common good. Civil society, in this view, is defined by a search for the common good. Prozesky approaches the matter first by looking at the global situation of religion in respect of politics and economy, through which he suggests the need for an ethic of creative co-operation as opposed to aggressive competition. The idea of well-being must be extended to be fully inclusive of all inhabitants of the earth, or of our local contexts for that matter, if it is to have ethical force. It should become a moral rule by which we might test the truthfulness of our claims and by which we might act.
What would this look like in practice? Bernard Lategan’s contribution on "values in the workplace" gives one view. In effect, he provides us with a framework for exploring and testing values in concrete locations. In his case, this location is the workplace, where the key questions of power and interests intersect with other values. How discourse about civil society is to be made accessible and public to those who participate in it is one matter he raises. Can the values embedded in particular discourses which normally do not integrate well or interact easily with each other, such as those of the academy, of the believing community, and of the market place, be treated together, brought up against one another? What kind of possibilities for social transformation does this offer? These are the issues Lategan explores, testing what is possible in the domain of the workplace, concretely in the context of mining corporations. In order to make sense of the issues, he turns to a comprehensive theory of needs and "satisfiers" found in the work of Max-Neef.
At this point, the discussion of this volume shifts in an entirely other direction. We move from the direction of general ethical frameworks to particular contexts of struggle. The first is brought into focus by the issue of how we might heal a society which has been broken by its past.
Denise Ackermann’s discussion of the idea of lament deals with key questions of brokenness and hope, suffering and healing, which must be addressed in a society as hurt and damaged as is South Africa. She seeks to go beyond the language of our famous "Truth and Reconciliation Commission," arguing that confession and whatever forgiveness may be given, however necessary, is too shallow to bear the burden of the past. Too many people have been hurt too deeply, and this hurt has social significance in both the short term and the long run. Our capacity to recognize this hurt and give it a means of public expression, without diminishing it, without converting it immediately into some demand for reconciliation, is Ackermann’s interest. Public lament is central to healing. It is central also to the hope for a civil society because it forces us to stand in awe of what has been done to people, what we perhaps have done to people, and to absorb this in its fullness. It thus forces our conversion and not simply our confession.
Another kind of history of suffering is revealed in the way in which "civil" behavior was defined by the colonial projects of European societies. It is a commonplace by now that the "civilization" which colonial traders, missionaries, functionaries, militaries and settlers thought they were offering Africans was inherently flawed in multiple ways. "What haven’t we given them?," is a common refrain of white settlers even today. It is taken for granted that what has been given excuses what was taken away, even if one acknowledges the guilt of the latter. "We" gave "them" the Bible, education, industry, technology, modern governance, and so on. Without it, "they" would be in even more dire straits. If that is the legacy of "civil" society, how do we recover an African sense of a civil society? This is the analysis offered by Chirevo Kwenda who explores, from an African point of view, the dichotomy of the practices of giving and receiving as they have played themselves out historically in African societies and in the colonial projects of European societies. Through this analysis he wishes to redeem the notion of "receiving," something colonists and settlers have found it difficult to do. An ethic of respect lies at the heart of his investigation of difference in the African context. Without it, he sees little prospect for civil society.
The penultimate essay takes us momentarily beyond Africa. Russel Botman is interested in the concept of the oikos, the Greek word that lies behind the English derivations from it of economy (oikonomia), ecology (oikologie) and ecumenical (oikoumene), meaning the "household." It is the "global economic era," the phenomena some have termed "globalization," which provides the foreground of a search for an ethical basis of value by which the resources for attacking poverty and domination may be determined. Botman’s concern about the contemporary hegemonies of markets (and we would add, state bureaucracies) is widely shared, of course. What he does in this essay is to state them in South African perspective, and in the process to link them to the potential of the African understanding of the human being captured in the notion of ubuntu, meaning "being human by virtue of other human beings."
The final essay in this work takes a further turn, this time towards sacred texts. Gerald West is well aware of the fact that the great majority of South Africans are religious, and that a great deal of their religious thinking is based on one or another sacred text. This is true even where African cultural traditions which are more oral in nature have been incorporated into, or even have shaped, the reading of sacred texts. It is also true where those texts cannot be read because people are illiterate, the reading is done there by other people, and has been so for many long decades. At every level, human beings are involved in interpreting not only the texts they read or hear, but their lives in relation to those texts. Very often, these texts are resources for constructing worlds of survival, worlds of sustenance, worlds of transformation even, probably with far more impact than the religious institutions which might be home to those texts. The "reading" of texts is therefore a crucial instrument of engagement in society. It may well be a resource for empowering people, and thus building the foundation of civil society, in ways not often recognized. Interpretation, he argues, is a site of struggle. West sets out to demonstrate this.
West’s work rests on extensive practical engagement with local communities, many of them poor, in South Africa, and for that reason, it leaves us at the end of this volume with perhaps the most crucial challenge of all, if we are to build a civil society in South Africa. It provides us, too, with a link to the question raised by Moosa at the end of Part I, about the place of religion and of religious normative claims under the conditions of a modern "secular society".
How do we bring into relationship with each other, in a pluralistic democratic society, the values of ordinary people with particular normative foundations captured in "sacred texts," and the values of "legal texts" such as the national Constitution which are intrinsically structured so as to represent a general rather than a particular public? How do we link difference and sameness so that they provide for a constructive engagement in the public sphere rather than a destructive rejection of the public sphere? And finally, how do we do all of this in such a way that we take seriously the rights of every person and all persons to the benefits and promises of that citizenship without which any civil society must founder or be betrayed? These are some of questions which, in the end, remain for the reader as well.
James R. Cochrane and Bastienne Klein
NOTES
1. One good example of this may be found in the theories of secularization which dominated numerous studies from the nineteen fifties to the seventies, all of which foresaw the gradual disappearance of religion as a major social factor. This "prediction" has foundered on the rocks of new waves of religious sensibility which have had as much social impact as at any time in human history. See, for example, José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
2. As Stephen Toulmin has persuasively argued in Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (NY: The Free Press, 1990), while our appreciation for difference may be new in relation to the project of modernity, it is not new historically. He traces multiple roots for an understanding of difference in the humanist Renaissance, and finds there a host of themes which we now recapitulate under "post-modernism."
3. George Soros, "The Capitalist Threat," Atlantic Monthly, February, 1997, which thesis he has subsequently questioned.
4. One of the permanent contradictions of apartheid policy was that blacks were seen to be separate "ethnic" entities, such as Zulu, Xhosa, Pedi, Tswana, etc., but whites were seen to a single "race" even though they might speak wholly different languages (English, Afrikaans, German, Latvian, Portuguese, Greek, Lebanese, etc.) and come from wholly different national and cultural backgrounds. The most obvious indicator of the purely ideological foundations of difference instituted by apartheid can be seen in the treatment of Japanese residents—given the status of "honorary whites," because of their importance for trade with Japan—and Chinese settlers, always classified as "non-white."
5. Conrad Barberton, Michael Blake and Hermien Kotze (eds.), Creating Action Space: The Challenge of Poverty and Democracy in South Africa (Cape Town: IDASA, 1998).
6. J. W. de Gruchy and S. Martin (eds), Religion and the Reconstruction of Civil Society (Pretoria: University of South Africa, 1995).
7. One indication of this is the recent establishment of the African Renaissance Institute by black academics and intellectuals. Though it is not exclusive, its leadership and its agenda have a different foundation and direction from that which has been "the norm" in South Africa in the twentieth century.
8. This notion comes from the work of Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Colonialism (London: James Currey, 1996). Foster touches on Mamdani’s work; Cochrane deals with it as well in chapter one.