South Africa and its citizens have recently had a great many reasons to be proud of their country. In accordance with the fundamental principle of anti-discrimination enshrined in the 1996 Constitution, South Africa has become a global leader in the struggle for equality as the fifth country, and the first in Africa, to write into law the right of same-sex partners to marry. The South African government has also demonstrated a renewed commitment to millions of HIV-infected citizens with the assignment of Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka to head the National AIDS Council. The country remains one of the most vibrant democracies in the world.

There remains, however, some cause for concern. President Mbeki has argued that “we should never allow ourselves the dangerous luxury of complacency, believing that we are immune to the conflicts that we see and have seen in so many parts of the world.”[1] In his seven years as head of state, President Mbeki has weathered deep criticism for what many see as failures of his leadership, in his misguided HIV policy, in the murky circumstances surrounding the “Arms Deal, ”in the inadequate provision of housing and essential services to South Africa’s urban poor and in failing to honour the Truth and Reconciliation Commission failing to pursue trials against those denied amnesty by the Commission and even granting amnesty to some perpetrators.

Common to all these failures is the denial of appropriate responsibility by Mbeki’s government, which seeks to locate blame for these overwhelming challenges elsewhere, in the history of apartheid. Mbeki is a public intellectual of as great a stature as his predecessor, and he makes his intellect available in a way that has fallen out of fashion elsewhere in the world. Mbeki’s delivery of the recent Nelson Mandela Memorial lecture[2] is a classic example, and it is the duty of Africans and global citizens to respond in as thoughtful a manner as the lecture itself. The present essay is not that response, but it may prompt debate.

The spirit and intent of the lecture - a call for ubuntu and a celebration of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s recent election - should be applauded heartily. Mbeki identifies our time as one of great fear and social conflict[3], and proposes that the young South African democracy has a great opportunity to practice the doctrine of ubuntu, in order to effect “an RDP of the soul.”[4] He undertakes a definition or explication of ubuntu, primarily by recourse to scripture, and by a syllogistic proof that human societies have “souls.”[5] This is perhaps surprising for a former Marxist intellectual and leader of a secular nation, but nonetheless appropriate in the context of a discussion of the philosophical and spiritual meaning of ubuntu.

More troubling is that, in the course of over 20 pages of erudite discussion, Mbeki cites ten thinkers, all of them Westerners, yet makes no mention of the pre-eminent theorist and philosopher of ubuntu, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who gave new prominence, articulation and effect to this philosophy through the body of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Using his Western sources, Mbeki constructs a thoughtful critique of the pervasive, atomizing, spiritually corrosive effects of modern capitalism. Yet surely ubuntu must be understood to be more than a principle of economic orientation, as simply anti-capitalism? Ubuntu is impoverished by illuminating it only by Western lights, or as a primarily economic philosophy, and encourages the interpretation of a great philosophical principle as merely an oppositional antidote to modern capitalism, denuded of the full richness of its meaning.

Mbeki’s vision of society is marked by profound essentialism. He argues that Apartheid-era white South African society was defined by the capitalist accumulation of wealth, and that the free South African state born in 1994 therefore “inherited a well-entrenched value system that placed individual acquisition of wealth at the very centre of the value system of our society as a whole.” He further argues that this system of capitalist values inherited by the new South Africa included “a tolerant or permissive attitude towards such crimes as theft and corruption, especially if these related to public property.”[6]

It is certainly true that white society under Apartheid had a powerful capitalist orientation. Yet it seems unwise to underestimate the competing influence of the ingrained values of white supremacy, which, though certainly not entirely opposed to capitalist interests, did not always perfectly align.[7] Even more troubling is the unexamined assertion that the new South Africa has “inevitably” imbibed wholesale the capitalist values of its predecessor regime in its “seemingly ‘seamless’” transition.

Indeed, I would argue that the new South Africa was predicated on a fundamental transformation of society, marked and celebrated publicly by the rise to head of state of the banned and imprisoned erstwhile “terrorist” Nelson Mandela, and the cherished, “one man, one vote” image of millions of black South Africans taking to the polls in 1994. This transformation in social values took deeper hold with its institutionalization in the 1996 Constitution, still widely acknowledged as one of the finest such documents in the world, and the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which established a public record of the extent and horror of the acts of the white supremacist regime, and further established beyond any doubt that such acts constitute crimes, even if such crimes might then be amnestied in the greater interests of South African society. The principle of ubuntu was cited in the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act of 1995, one of the new South Africa’s foundational texts and the basis for the TRC.

If the new South Africa, by means of ubuntu and otherwise, was able to substantially transform the white supremacist values of South African society, why does President Mbeki see such a failure to transform the pernicious effects of capitalism? There are several possible answers, and Mbeki hints at some. Capitalist values are far more pervasive than those of white supremacy (distressingly widespread as those are). Mbeki further posits a strange elective affinity between South Africans’ hard-won freedom and capitalist values, as follows:

This peculiar striving produces the particular result that manifestations of wealth, defined in specific ways, determine the individuality of each one of us who seeks to achieve happiness and self-fulfilment, given the liberty that the revolution of 1994 brought to all of us.

In these circumstances, the meaning of freedom has come to be defined not by the seemingly ethereal and therefore intangible gift of liberty, but by the designer labels on the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, the spaciousness of our houses and our yards, their geographic location, the company we keep, and what we do as part of that company.[8]

This proposed elective affinity is a fascinating case meriting further exploration, but some immediate reservations leap to mind, including the difficulty of distinguishing between the effects of this affinity and South Africans simply taking advantage of their newfound economic and social mobility to improve their standard of living from the enforced lows of the apartheid era. If this self-improvement motive is what Mbeki describes in the paragraphs above, he runs the risk of criticizing those who strive to better their condition while at the same time undermining the standard of living of the poorest South Africans by facilitating the privatization of essential services to communities most in need of improvement and assistance. What economic content ubuntu has appears substantially opposed to the neo-liberal approach to economics and development that the Mbeki and his government have often espoused.

Ubuntu is a crucial value in African societies and elsewhere, but those at the bottom of the economic pile may have little patience for arguments against striving for a better economic role. Their scope to practice ubuntu is limited by the harsh necessities of their circumstances, and a philosophical approach to their situation that is not complemented by concrete practical steps may appear less than relevant. To call for ubuntu is worthy, even trite, but will have little traction with those who struggle daily simply to feed their children.

Yet most troubling is Mbeki’s unwillingness to see the post-1994 ANC government as complicit in sustaining and even promoting these capitalist values in its twelve year rule. Throughout the lecture, Mbeki rhetorically foregoes responsibility for the current state of society in South Africa, framing the struggle as one against “the legacy of poverty, racism and sexism.”[9] While the legacy of apartheid is powerful and omnipresent, twelve years of independence must necessarily have shaped this legacy in powerful ways, just as the legacy of white supremacy has been transformed. Yet Mbeki gives no account of his government’s role in addressing the ongoing challenges of poverty, racism and sexism, except to reiterate Mandela’s twelve year old call for “an RDP of the soul,” in an effort to promote national reconciliation.

The language of reconciliation places the focus on the history of apartheid, and does not consider the action of the post-apartheid government beyond its attempts to make good what apartheid besmirched. While this is a truly honourable goal, it is no longer an adequate frame of reference for a government that has now ruled for twelve years with a commanding political majority. This elision of responsibility strikes a chord with Africans across the continent who have seen great leaders turn away from their people while placing the blame for citizens’ suffering always elsewhere.

Mbeki’s call for a renewed focus on national reconciliation, for an “RDP of the soul,” should be applauded, and is part of an ongoing effort to walk clear of the shadow of his great predecessor who gave this lecture its name by restating and enlarging the aims of the original RDP.[10] But President Mbeki and his colleagues in the Tripartite Alliance cannot continue to address South Africa’s condition only in terms of the apartheid past. Mbeki has been a leader for many years, and head of state for seven. South Africa will be the poorer, economically, intellectually and spiritually, for each year that passes without a searching assessment of contemporary policy by those now at the head of the country.

Cites:
Proverbs, Shakespeare (Othello)Later: Faustus, Tawney, Polanyi, Stiglitz, Soros, Proverbs, Genesis, Engels, Marx, Descartes (in French), St John, Yeats

References:

[1] President Thabo Mbeki, Nelson Mandela Memorial Lecture, July 5 th 2006, p. 29.

[2] Available here

[3] Mandela Lecture, p. 22.

[4] Mandela Lecture, p. 1-2, 4. This phrase was originally coined by Nelson Mandela while commenting on South Africa’s Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP)

[5] Mandela Lecture, p. 7.

[6] Mandela Lecture, p. 10.

[7] “Bantu Education,” for example, limited the function of blacks in South African capitalism by inhibiting their roles as producers and consumers. Similarly, the desire to preserve white superiority in employment roles contributed to the rise and endurance of “poor whites,” who were both too unskilled to assume any employment deemed worthy of whites and unable to claim menial work because of racist employment principles.

[8] Mandela Lecture, p. 13.

[9] Mandela Lecture, p. 26.

[10] Mandela Lecture, p. 6.