Aeolian Harp of Renewal: The Private and the Public in Political Engagement

by CHARLES VILLA-VICENCIO

Charles Villa-Vicencio is executive director of the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation (www.ijr.org.za). He was formerly national research director of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and holds the position of emeritus professor at the University of Cape Town.

The slippage is seen in the rise and fall of ancient empires, in the Jacobins washing away the sins of the world in the blood of the guillotine, in Leninists and Stalinists committed to the cause of alienated humanity and in Mao Zedong's long march. More recently it is seen operating at different levels of intensity in Third World revolutions in Latin America and Africa, in the apartheid dream of the white Afrikaner, and in the engagement of the American-led “coalition of the willing” against terrorism, Islamic extremism, and the axis of evil.

The question is whether and how the commitment to freedom embedded in the grandiloquent cries of nations—strident, defiant, sentimental, sober, and solemn—driven by passion, ethical vision, religion, and/or secular vision can counter the temptations of power, often laced with the capacity to self-destruct.

Suffice it to say, future freedoms need to be secured in the present. Tomorrow's temptations need to be countered today. Abraham Kuyper, in his celebrated Lectures on Calvinism, sees this as the ongoing obligation of any nation. He articulates this in the metaphor of the aeolian harp that, he tells us, is induced to music by the rustle of the wind. “Until the wind blew, the harp remained silent, while, again, even though the wind arose, if the harp did not lie in readiness, a rustling of the breeze might be heard, but not a single note of ethereal music delighted the ear.”¹ He argues effectively that the structures and systems of organized society need to be ready, fine-tuned and in-waiting to appropriate and respond to the winds of change and opportunity that history provides.

I argue in what follows that western notions of liberalism and multiculturalism seldom meet the needs of nations in transition that have to deal with deeply entrenched cultural, ethnic, racial, and other divisions. I argue further that a Kuyperian appreciation of the sensitivities around these issues, coupled with a traditional African notion of communal belonging, epitomized in a sense of ubuntu (a concept to which I return), deserves to be revisited both philosophically and at the level of practical politics. Although worlds and years apart, both affirm a communal rather than a liberal individualistic approach to nation building. Both seek to steer a middle path between “modernist” notions of rationalism and “traditional” belonging. As such, both affirm a reformist approach to political transition rather than a revolutionary approach, questioning the realistic possibility of zero-hour options for political renewal.

Kuyper's understanding of effective political living has of course been employed, used, abused, and recreated by a range of scholars and students. I am suggesting, perhaps ironically, that his notion of sphere sovereignty (so horribly abused by apartheid ideologues) could have served as a catalyst for a more tolerant South Africa. It could have provided a basis for socio-ethnic inclusion, rather than being used to provide a philosophical and theological justification for apartheid.

It could, of course, be argued that this redirecting of an ethnic or tribal misuse of Kuyperian thought by white Afrikaner ideologues is both dangerous and (yet again) a false use of Kuyper. Max Stackhouse correctly indicates that spheres in Kuyper are “specialised human activities—politics, church, science, art etc., not ethnic, tribal or national groups—except for family.”² This said, the traditional Afrikaner sense of Volk, grounded in blood, belonging, and fatherland (plus the African concept of extended family), employs an ethnic and cultural interpretation of Kuyper. The question is whether a “new” interpretation of Kuyper, even if false, is legitimate if it helps to heal a nation, which was, of course, Kuyper's primary objective. More important is the question whether it does or can contribute to enabling a nation of such diversity as South Africa to learn to live together.

I suggest that inclusive, democratic pluralism that allows for a self-conscious sense of cultural and ethnic belonging is perhaps the only available political antidote to counter the elevation of a particular cultural and ethnic group, sometimes under guise of an inclusive political vision, from being elevated to the level of the universal. In theological terms, it has to do with ensuring that the politics of the dominant class is never allowed to be seen as the politics of God. Democratic politics need to be probing and competitive. It is often conflictive. At best it is also adaptive, flexible, dialogical, and conciliatory. This, suggests Bernard Crick, is the way free societies remain free. “If we act so unnaturally as to try to merge all our individuality and all our corporate differences in one common enterprise, then that enterprise is inevitably crazy and destructive—like the chase of the white whale Moby Dick, heroic, but inhuman and fatal.”³ Words worth pondering! Politics is necessarily a “messy, mundane, inconclusive, tangled business, far removed from the passion of certainty and the fascination for world-shaking quest that drives the totalitarian [impulse].”⁴ It is at its best when poets, satirists, alienated people, and ordinary citizens stare down the steely eye of the single-minded and overconfident politician, intellectual, revolutionary, or priest. The guardians of democracy, no less than leaders of other kinds, themselves need to be guarded.

Embedded in a South African context, for it is here that I live and have my being, I relate the South African quest for nation building to the concerns of people elsewhere in our world who in their own way seek to live together in societies that are deeply divided by different social and material realities.

To this end I discuss:

• The theologized nationalism of the South African apartheid regime, grounded as it was in a brand of neo-Calvinism and a distorted reading of Kuyper.

• The reality of ethnic and material divisions.

• The role of the “public” and the “private” as a safeguard and incentive in the nation-building project.

• Options for cultural diversity and political pluralism.

South Africa's Theologized Nationalism

This is neither the time nor the place to engage the complexities of South African political history.⁵ It is also not necessary to revisit the particularhistory of Afrikaner nationalism within which apartheid is ideologically embedded.⁶ I will not address the debate between materialists and idealists on whether Afrikaner nationalism is grounded in economic privilege or the more romantic sense of divine mission that simply resulted in privilege and prosperity. This is an old and enduring debate, with tentacles that reach into the politics of New England, contemporary prosperity cults of Christianity, the emerging elite of new nations, and the tried and tested dictums of the established elite who insist they worked damn hard for what they have and that God has blessed them. It is enough for present purposes to identify only the broadest philosophical parameters of white nationalism that resulted in the near conflagration of the country, the eventual settlement between essentially white Boer and black African in the 1990s, and the birth of democracy that followed.

The white foothold on South African shores in the sixteenth century was intended to be no more than a halfway house for sailing ships on the long sea voyage to India. In time it evolved into a settlement, surviving as it did under the harsh dictates of the VOC (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie) or Dutch East India Company. “In its great shadow, nothing could grow. The remarkable thing is not that the Afrikaner took so long to emerge, but that they emerged at all,” writes Afrikaner author and historian W. A. de Klerk.⁷ There was little to bind together this remote embryonic community, other than a simple down-to-earth brand of Calvinism rooted in the 1618 Synod of Dort restrictions. Bolstered by the arrival of the French Huguenots in 1688 and blended into the harsh realities of frontier life, an austere yet simple brand of Christianity underpinned by a fundamentalist reading of the Bible produced a worldview that made sense to a people who in time would come to regard themselves as having been deliberately placed by God on the southern tip of Africa for a purpose.⁸

The underlying similarities between the evolving Calvinism on Africa's southern tip and that of the Calvinists of New England in the eighteenth century are there to be seen, as are the contrasts.⁹ While the Calvinists of New England were passing through their religious Great Awakening and coming to grips with a secular bill of human rights, the Dutch and French colonists of the Cape were being increasingly isolated from the dawning of the European enlightenment. At the same time, with few exceptions, they isolated themselves from the Khoisan and other African communities, an isolation that led to confrontation, exploitation, and war with the indigenous people of the area. Then, as time passed, the cry of freedom and independence slowly and hesitantly began to be heard among the settlers, a cry grounded in racial separation that would shape the future of a nation waiting to be born.

The tale is a heroic and a tragic one. It needs to be understood not as an isolated phenomenon of a peculiar people doomed to destroy themselves through self-assertion and the humiliation of others. It is better understood as part of a more general picture of a threatened people, driven by religion, more especially a Puritan faith, who sought both power and divine approval. The outcome was an obsession with being a chosen instrument in the hands of a divine Architect. As the emphasis on the instrument increased, so the place of divine transcendence became subtly subjected to a popular religio-political myth of a chosen people. The vox dei was being reduced to the vox populi. Of course, there was resistance: Andrew Murray, an important influence in the Dutch Reformed Church and pietist critic of growing nationalist trends within the church at the time, warned of “the danger that the voice of blood, the voice of passion, of partisanship, of group interest will overpower the voice of the Gospel.”¹⁰ Such voices were, however, few and far between within the ecclesial citadel.

This sense of divine mission therefore took time to come to full expression. There was much to happen in the interim. The Anglo-Boer War—long, bitter and grueling—would eventually be won by the British. Afrikaners were split between those who sought conciliation with the British and those who emphasized the priority of die eie—the me and mine—an enhanced Afrikaner consciousness built around language, identity, land, and religion. Within this blending of nationalist politics and a brand of neo-Calvinist thought, the wisdom of Kuyper's “sovereignty of spheres” was turned on its head and thrown into the mix.

Kuyper wrote, in his Princeton lectures, of the need for the state to protect itself against disintegration by acknowledging and respecting the sovereignty of a range of individual and social spheres within society.¹¹ For good order to prevail, the state, he insisted, needed to counter anarchy, while never allowing itself to become despotic or oppressive. To this end Kuyper stressed the place of individual and social spheres as a structure of common grace directly under God, “with nothing above them except God.”¹² In modern parlance they exist as a “check and balance” against the dominance of the state. “The state,” he insists, “may never become an octopus, which stifles the whole of life.” He then switches the metaphor, telling us that government “must occupy its own place, on it own root, among all the other trees of the forest.”¹³ And yet, more than a block against totalitarianism, Kuyper grounds the sovereignty of spheres in a sense of diversity that he attributes to the order of creation, seeing God as the author of the unity and diversity of humanity.¹⁴ The implication is that no one race, culture, creed, or volk could claim superiority over another. He stressed the need for the state to recognize and respect such “innate laws of life” as a “divine mandate” within each of these spheres, accepting that it cannot control or deliver on the all the needs of society. Peter Berger saw this, of course, in arguing that the “mega structures” of society cannot provide the inspiration for all its citizens without the assistance and engagement of other collectives.¹⁵

Subjected to neither the wisdom nor the folly of modern thought, Kuyper anticipated the affirmation of individual and communal rights and plural democracy central to political debate, as we know it today. He sought to protect the rights of individuals and communities, recognizing the affirmation and struggle for such rights as having been a God-given right and duty.¹⁶ He saw the family unit, business, science and the arts, plus what James Luther Adams later popularized as “voluntary associations,” as given by God to counter and arrest the capacity of the state to dominate.¹⁷

What does all this, plausible and important as it is, have to do with Afrikaner nationalism and the origins of apartheid? Zealous Afrikaner nationalists were by the beginning of the nineteenth century resisting not their cousins in the VOC but British colonialists and those Afrikaners who were seen to be collaborators with the imperialists. They seized on the notion of the innate law of God within the Afrikaner volk not as a corrective to a state dominance that marginalized the right to Afrikaner culture, language, and belief but as a means to power itself. For them the state needed to promote the God-given inner spirit of the volk, protecting it against the threat of impulses grounded in other cultures, people, and would-be power blocs. And there is a sense in which Kuyper's understanding of the nation lent itself to nationalist ends. “God created nations. They exist for him,” he wrote. “They are his own.”¹⁸ It was a simple step to relate this to what Afrikaner intellectuals, like H. G. Stoker, referred to as the “organic, primary structure and goal that gives vitality and energy to such basic units as family and nation.”¹⁹ Afrikaner ideologues argued that the volk was an instrument of God through which the individual realized his or her God-given potential as a person—a centripetal point to be nurtured and promoted through the affirmation of what is one's own—in poetry, song, prayer, and other forms of culture. This was a short step to apartheid ideology that separated the races to ensure the promotion of a particular identity.

The other side of Kuyper's understanding of the nation as God-given is, of course, that the nation is located under the sovereignty of God, existing “for his glory … so that divine wisdom might shine forth through them,”²⁰ a notion that was soon played down. Nico Diederichs (later to become a South African State President) would return from study abroad to become professor of philosophy at Grey University College of the Free State and further develop the link between individual and national identity. “Without the elevating, ennobling and enriching influence of this highest inclusive unity which we call a nation,” he wrote, “mankind cannot reach the fullest heights of his human existence… Only through the nation as the most total, most inclusive human community can man realize himself to the full. The nation is the fulfillment of the individual life.”²¹ “To work for the realisation of the national calling is to work for the realisation of God's plan. Service to the nation is part of my service to God.”²² Drawing on immanentist philosophy and neo-Fichtean forms of idealism, Diederichs and several others came close to reducing the transcendence of God to the volksgeist of the Afrikaner people.²³ Stoker, who with many advocates of the Afrikaner Language Movement, spoke with equal enthusiasm of the importance of family and nation within church and state, cautioned Diederichs against the danger of deification of the nation, but the die was cast. Without surrendering to the philosophical musings of Diederichs and others, theologians and biblical scholars developed an elaborate biblical justification of the separation of races and apartheid.²⁴ The Dutch Reformed Church was Afrikaner nationalism at prayer. Politicians, preachers, teachers, purveyors of popular culture, and a gullible and self-serving white electorate did the rest. From a theological perspective, it was neo-Calvinism and neo-Kuyperianism that won the day.

All this is by way of context. The result was a form of unbridled theologized nationalism that the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, the World Council of Churches, and others would, in time, declare to be a heresy. It was a complex and relatively easy slide from religious piety to the national arrogance of a battle won in 1948, with the National Party coming to power. The story, I have already suggested, is not a unique one. In one form or another, it is the story of a subtle slippage from the rise to the fall of nations seen in ancient and in modern times. It is the story of a universal tendency among nations to declare that which is not part of us to be alien and dangerous, whether un-Aryan, un-South African, un-American, or un-anything else. Wole Soyinka recently spoke of a “near unbroken continuum of history” between politics and religion, which he sees as two sides of the same coin. He suggests that while sanctimoniousness characterizes the political, sacrosanctity is the contribution of religion to the social engineering that threatens the option to be free.²⁵

What is almost unique is the relatively peaceful advent of South African democracy in 1994, marking the beginning of a liberating process out of the iron cage of white self-deceit that characterized apartheid. Although incredible progress has been made in this regard, there is still a great deal of work to be done in overcoming the racial, ethnic, cultural, and economic divisions that continue to challenge the nation. It is here that the focus of this presentation is located.

Ethnic and Material Divisions

The South African revolution is a celebration of national unity, while deliberately seeking to provide space for minority groups to affirm their particular identities. There is an overt constitutional commitment to ensure that the center holds. The question is how in practice, not least in the wake of years of imposed legal separation of the races, South Africans can learn to live together in unity and diversity.

The overwhelming majority of notable conflicts around the world today are between communities within nation states rather than between nation states. Most of these conflicts are at least partially rooted in the failure of ethnic, cultural, and religious communities to coexist peacefully. It is, at the same time, important to recognize that ethnic, cultural, and religious conflicts are almost invariably intertwined with some form of material deprivation and/or political exclusion. It is essentially when individuals and groups experience a sense of exclusion from the body politic and its material benefits that they draw on identity concerns to drive and legitimate their political and material agendas.

The intriguing question is that if the alienation is at least partially if not essentially material, why do dissident groups resort to cultural and religious language, rituals, and practice to give expression to their alienation? It probably has something to do with the depth of the marginalization and alienation often experienced by excluded groups. Although alienation is invariably grounded in and driven by political and economic decision making, it reaches deep into the realm of the spiritual and metaphysical. Not dropping from heaven, it is forged in history—impacting on body and limb—while posing questions that reach into the depths of the meaning of life itself. It is a cry from and to the very ground of one's being. It is an appeal to the most essential sources of life, the ancestors, the spirits, the soil, the tradition, and the gods.

Examples abound, not least on the African continent: the source of Mayi Mayi deprivation and exclusion in the Kivu provinces in the eastern part of the Congo is essentially socioeconomic, and yet they draw on cultural and traditional religious forces, magic, ancestor veneration, and the traditional forms of spirituality to give expression to their exclusion. The Casamance people, alienated by the dominant Senegalese culture and social economy, draw on Diola culture to justify their struggle for political and economic independence. Material essentials such as land, rice, and rain are spoken of almost with the same breath as ancestors, spirits, and the Supreme Being. The origins of the Lord's Resistance Army in Northern Uganda, in turn, emerged out of the Holy Spirit Movement under Alice Lakwena, grounded in political and economic exclusion.

To such African examples, there needs to be added the religious and ethnic identity concerns of the Roman Catholics in Northern Ireland; Serbs, Muslims, and Croats in the Balkans; the Kurds in Iran and Iraq; the Sikhs in Northern India and Kashmir and Tamils in Sri Lanka; the Basques in Spain; Papua and Aceh in Indonesia; and the concerns of Tibetans. Take, too, the sense of exclusion of Pakistanis in Britain, Hispanics in the United States, aborigines in Australia, Maoris in New Zealand, the Inuit in Canada, the French in Quebec, and the Khoi-San, plus some Afrikaner groups, in South Africa.

International instruments on group and minority rights, beginning essentially with the recommendation of the UN subcommittee on the Prevention of Discrimination and the Protection of Minority Rights in 1954, signal an increasing awareness by the international community that groups excluded from the dominant culture of their environment—on the basis of ethnicity, religion, and language—constitute a threat to national and regional stability. This underlines the need to include in the nation-building process all those who have the capacity to undermine peacemaking and democracy, without allowing them to jeopardize the emergence of an equitable and just new order.

Differently stated, there is an increasing global awareness that nations— not least nations in transition from oppressive rule and sustained violence— that fail to address the threat represented by groups excluded from the nation-building process do so at their own peril. The necessary balance required in this regard is a delicate one. To delay the creation of a shared and inclusive culture is to allow dissident groups to perpetuate the old order. To proceed too quickly is, on the other hand, to promote resentment and potential destabilization. The question of how to build an inclusive state in situations of deep historical, cultural, religious, and material divisions gives expression to a political challenge to emerging democracies that the academia, politicians, and all sound-minded citizens would do well to heed. It concerns what seems to be a deep and abiding ontological or “metareality” that underlies the often asocial and politically destructive behavior of dissident groups. It takes more than the strong arm of the law, as important as this may be, to control or include those who feel their identity threatened by an emerging new order.

The difficulties involved at least partially explain the global shift in recent years to the reemergence of the nation state, witnessed, for example, in the disintegration of the Soviet bloc. Martin Marty points to an increasing preoccupation with the particular, with the own. He writes of a mental shift from the “global village” and the “spaceship earth,” “homogenisation” and “planetisation” to “particularism” and “difference,” if not “tribal warfare.”²⁶ So, South Africa, will the center hold? Does the state have the capacity and the will to recognize and respond to the hopes and the fears of particular groups within the nation—black African, colored, people of Asian extraction, and white people? What is the role of civil society, communities, and family groups in this regard? Do such social spheres have a contribution to make that the state is unable to provide? Who brings the social tissue found in culture and community values to the larger national debate?

The problems involved were interestingly anticipated at a crucial turning point in resistance politics that preceded the banning of the African National Congress (ANC) and other liberal movements in 1960. The 1955 Freedom Charter states: “There shall be equal status in the bodies of state, in the courts and in the schools of all national groups and races; all national groups shall be protected by law against insults to their race and national pride; all people shall have equal rights to use their own language and to develop their own folk culture and customs.”²⁷ For all our limitations in getting the formula exactly right, people around the world hold this South African sense of inclusivity in esteem. At home, on the other hand, we continue to wrestle with the difficulties of learning to live together, and we wonder whether our many cultures can ever be included in the one nation comprising many cultures upheld by President Mandela in his 1994 inaugural presidential address.

Ten years later there is an indication that although disintegration is unlikely, this oneness is being challenged by a growing sense of particularism. Khoi-San origins are celebrated, there is a growing pride among those who trace their identity to the arrival of sixteenth-century slaves, Afrikaners claim their place as a tribe of Africa, South African Indians affirm their cultural origins, and Muslim women are increasingly being seen in public in black veils. Only the South African English, speaking generally, still seem to struggle to define their ancestral origins both beyond language and global dominance of some kind. The black African majority is no more homogeneous than any other group, and yet, perhaps because of a new sense of dominance, they are largely indifferent to the searches and squabbles that constitute the identity struggles of minority groups, although some black intellectuals enjoy dipping their oars into such debates, often to the annoyance of those whites who prefer not to be questioned on such matters.

The question is how to create space in society to allow people to affirm, even reinforce, their particular identity while liberating themselves and their tradition from the kind of chauvinistic self-assertion that limits or closes down on the space and opportunity for others to be themselves. This is where Kuyper's sense of the importance of social spheres needs to be reassessed. Difference-blind models of coexistence that suggest we opt for what is common while playing down what makes us different simply does not work in a society rooted in the kind of separation that is still part of the South African consciousness and indeed that of the United States.²⁸ Perhaps it is those who are most rooted and secure in their own identity who do not assume that the me and mine (die eie) are more important than you and yours (die ander)—witnessed in South Africa in Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and white Afrikaners such as Bram Fischer, Beyers Naudé, and others—who provide a sense of direction in the quest to enable people of different identities to live in harmony and peace.

The Public and the Private

Hannah Arendt develops an important argument regarding the relationship between the private and the public, contending that the former provides a space for reflection in which to prepare for action in public.²⁹ It is within the private that the nature and cost of public involvement needs to be weighed and considered, recognizing that family and community are core socializing units that inspire and create the moral and ethical values in society. It is here that the individual needs to discover the integrity of his or her essential self. And, from Arendt's perspective, if one's most private spiritual, ethical, and cultural values do not have public beneficence they become the very source of greed, hypocrisy, and social conflict.

For these values to mature and have public beneficence, they need space in which to grow and develop. Hence is demonstrated the importance of Kuyper's understanding of the need to protect and nurture social spheres, James Luther Adams's emphasis on voluntary associations, and the importance of what Robert Bellah and others call “rich associational diversity”³⁰ as vital to the pursuit of a healthy society. Each group needs to be challenged by other groups, whereas individually and collectively they need to challenge and renew the nation.

The basis of a vibrant and sustainable democracy is engagement between different worldviews, values, and traditions as a basis for the evolution of an integrated national debate that is reduced to the kind of monolithic conformity that excludes those who differ. For this to happen there needs to be space for conflict to happen. Community, ubuntu, and belonging do not exclude conflict. They seek ways to transcend exclusion and enduring hostility. They recognize that there comes a time for the “washing of the spears,” without suggesting that there is room for everyone (racists, anarchists, and thugs included) in a community committed to inclusion and peace. Values and rules are required for any community to survive. Viable values and rules need at the same time to be negotiated and inclusive. For this to happen there needs to be noisy debate and harsh words. There needs to be room for anger to ensure that the wind blowing through the Aeolian harp provides music that is not too soft to facilitate the stormy reality of nation building.

The balance between the one and the many, between unity and diversity, is a crucial ingredient of the nation-building process, not least in countries in transition from autocratic rule to the beginning of democracy, such as South Africa, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Yet, there is a sense in which countries are always in transition. The demographic shift in the United States, its changing cultural ethos, and the shift in power relations make the process of learning to live with difference as pertinent to your country as it is to mine.

We speak of cultural wars, the clash of civilizations, and religious-inspired separatism. The need is not for competing ideologies, religions, and worldviews as a basis for scoring points or persuading ourselves that ours is best (because we seldom persuade anyone else). That is not how healthy conversations, or for that matter conversions, happen. Healthy living is rather about bringing different perceptions, values, and arguments to national endeavor as a basis for learning to live together in peace. We need, in the words of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, each to drink from our own wells. And yet, as we drink deep, we sense the common ingredients of the water of different wells, wondering to what extent they may just tap into at least parts of the same subterranean river. Back to Hannah Arendt. She reminds us that an exclusivist religion or ideology “shields us … from the impact of reality … ruining the mind's capacity for judgment and for learning.”³¹ Martin Prozesky, writing at the time of the South African transition on the need to create a new, inclusive national ethos, argues that it is “the right of every woman, man and child on this planet to be as fully fulfilled a creator of spiritual means of production as all others.”³² The question needs to, at least, be entertained as to whether the most alienated members of any society have the opportunity to be heard and to share in the creation of the national ethos.

Differently put, the structures and systems of organized society need to be such that the voice of all interest groups that comprise that nation can be heard and responded to in an appropriate manner. Where this fails to happen, the music of the aeolian harp cannot be heard. The noise of clashing symbols, or alternatively the morose silence of indifference, augur well for no society.

Diversity and Pluralism

Contemporary intellectual debate on diversity, pluralism, and participation has many contours. It is shaped, inter alia, by a sense of common justice, abstracted from diverse participatory traditions. Rawls suggests that we best cultivate political civility by voluntarily extricating ourselves from the pull of particularism, as a basis for realizing a consensual universality within which everyone feels at home.³³ Michael Novak, in turn, speaks of the public square as an “empty shrine,” which he optimistically defines as a “reverential emptiness at the heart of pluralism.”³⁴ For him, it is a place of transcendence within which each participant is invited to reach beyond his or her own tribal identity in pursuit of the common good. He, at the same time, recognizes that the individual and group can do so only from “within lived social worlds,” arguing that it is impossible to leave one's culture and identity outside the square, to climb out of one's own skin.³⁵ This dialectic acknowledged, I suggest that deep encounter with the other enables one to realize that one's being is completed only through engaging the other, an understanding that resides at the heart of the African notion of ubuntu. In contemporary South Africa ubuntu is a trendy, romantic notion often appropriated and exploited by whites and promoted by advertising agencies. It is also a notion that gives poetic expression that is part of an African worldview that recognizes the importance of belonging, of respect for community values, and the need to find one's humanity in the humanity of others. Whatever its origins—and without suggesting that it is commonly practiced by Africans, anymore than that the essential value of Christianity, Judaism, or Islam are practiced by most who claim to affirm them—ubuntu provides a vision and incentive that challenges the presuppositions of western individualism that nations would do well to consider.

The question is how to give practical effect to these aspirations. It has partly to do with reconsidering the link between faith, community, and nation without reducing the latter to the former. It is about encouraging different cultural visions, memories, cultures, religions, myths, and languages of different groups and tribes to be affirmed, celebrated, and promoted through debate and participation. As implied earlier, this can perhaps best be facilitated by associations ranging from academic institutions, faith communities, cultural foundations, historical associations, and arts, music, and language festivals, as a basis for encouraging individuals and groups to explore the meaning of their own cultures, to push the boundaries of their cultures, to engage the culture of others and, importantly, to explore the relationship between cultures both where these clash and where they complement.

I emphasize three things: one, identity is more than skin deep. While taught, evolving and hybridized, it is also metaphysical and spiritual. Identity and cultural concerns of individuals and minorities are unlikely to wither away easily. They can be a source of social instability, not least to a young democracy. It is therefore wise statecraft to draw those with such concerns into the nation-building project. Two, for this to happen, space needs to be created for cultural associations to drive, facilitate, and enable that participation. Three, there is a strong material basis to the identity debate. Where body and limb, material possessions, and survival are under threat, cultural exclusivity is often resorted to as a vehicle to justify and drive conflict in the name of religion, language, culture, and memory. We cannot afford to ignore the economic challenge we face. It has the capacity to destroy the gains we have made since 1994. To fail to deal with the material means that the cultural and ethnic challenges we face will intensify in the years ahead. Recognizing the dangers of exclusion, the South African Constitution, like the Freedom Charter before it, interestingly affirms and celebrates diversity as a necessary ingredient of South African identity, entrenching eleven official languages. The representation of minority parties in the National Assembly is based on a formula of as little as a quarter of one percent of the national vote, all this to ensure participation in the nation-building project. The bigger challenge is, of course, to give expression to this commitment to inclusivity in everyday life, where exclusion continues to be experienced.

An inclusive democracy incorporates both invitation and challenge. These are the flip sides of the same coin, which involve the affirmation of the inherent link between reconciliation, social inclusion, and economic development. Reflecting on these challenges, Njabulo Ndebele powerfully and yet simply suggests that reconciliation and inclusion have not so much to do with present realities as with “who we can become.”³⁶ This reminds us that for reconciliation to survive and cultural tolerance to prosper, the material and the subjective must be promoted as two sides of the same coin.

Can Kuyper, understood within the broad ambit of ubuntu and the need for communal living, provide a balance between unity and diversity where liberalism and multiculturalism have failed?

Liberalism

In brief, liberalism suggests essentially that where rights are in place, culture is less of an issue. It implies a public square where issues of coexistence can be dealt with in a quiet and rational manner that plays down such contentious issues as race, gender, and class, those very things that some would argue constitute the essential ingredients of what it means to be human. If this is the case, the playing down of these essentials undermines the capacity of constituent groups to participate in the nation-building project, especially those who are without the economic, intellectual, and language resources of the dominant group.

What some see as the culture-free, simple efficiency of the liberal state is, of course, often thick with cultural overtones. It is oh so easy to persuade ourselves that liberal democracy creates room for all. If only to avoid self-illusion, we need to listen most attentively to those who occupy the margins of the public square. They tend to see the fault lines of the inclusive square more clearly than do those most comfortably at home within it. It takes more than the tolerance of an African shirt, a taub, a scarf, or a yarmulke to transcend cultural domination. Max Weber reminded us that culture is more than a light cloak that we can don or throw off our shoulders at will.³⁷

Surface-level transformation and inclusion raise the question as to whether multiculturalism can be a credible alternative to culturally exclusive models of liberalism.

Multiculturalism

Apartheid was, of course, built on multicultural difference and the promotion of group identity, as a pretext to dominate. Boerestaat (Afrikaner homeland) politics and Zulu nationalism, in turn, and in a different way, continue to affirm the right to be different. Building a society in which different cultures and ethnic groups live side by side, rather than exploring the possibilities of engaging one another, clearly has its own set of problems.

A limitation of multiculturalism is its failure to address the ambiguities of identity. Particular groups—whether Afrikaners, Khoi-San, or Griqua in South Africa or Hispanics, Polish-Americans, or, for that matter, women in the United States—are not homogeneous. They include the wealthy, the poor, intellectuals, men, women, workers, and management. These different groupings—whether workers, management, or youth—often have more in common across cultural and ethnic lines than they have with others within their own particular group, calling into question any simple sense of cultural bonding.

Gloria Anzaldua, in Borderlands/La Frontera, tells the intriguing story of a Chicano lesbian woman who struggles for survival on the edge of an American city. “The new mestiza,” she writes, “copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity. She learns to juggle cultures. She has a plural personality, she operates in a dualistic mode—nothing is thrust out, the good the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned. Not only does she sustain the contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else.”³⁸ She incorporates here several identities. There is nothing static, nothing fixed. Is she an exception, a caricature, or an anticipation of the kind of cultural mix your nation, my nation, is likely to face?

A sense of multiculturalism that allows us merely to live side by side with toleration while failing to address this integration, change, and evolution of identities evades the real challenge of living together. It is a stereotype. At worst, it can be racist. It seeks to counter liberalism's unity over diversity, with diversity in unity that does little to explore trajectories beyond separate identities. At worst, it can be little more than a ruse for living with subtle but entrenched separation, or what was once defined as “separate but equal.”

Cultural Openness

Can the community identity focus of Kuyper, augmented with a shot of African ubuntuism, contribute more than liberalism and multiculturalism to an inclusive nation-building process? Does Kuyper deserve another chance?³⁹ Suitably contextualized in a culturally diverse world, the answer is probably “yes.” The idea of cultural openness and inclusivity involves the exploration of the future rather than the protection of the past or entrenchment of the present. It considers what tomorrow may hold, rather than trying to prevent the inevitable. In so doing, it needs to address the relationship between the private and the public, recognizing that identity is always identity-in-the-making. It must be aware that new, complex identities are today as dominant in the global village as are tribal and ethnic separation.

Debate in South Africa has, at times, become heated as to who is entitled to be regarded as an African. Are whites who have been part of the soil for over three hundred years African? What do we make of the white tribe of Africa, the Afrikaner? Consider the words of South African novelist Zakes Mda:

African identity is a very novel phenomenon. It is, in fact, an identity-in-the-making. Until a hundred years ago the inhabitants of the continent did not generally refer to themselves as Africans—either as a racial or a continental identity. They recognised and celebrated various identities that were based on ethnicity, clan, family, gender and class— and later on nation and religion.

In South Africa the first people to collectively call themselves Africans were the descendants of the Dutch and French Huguenot settlers who were known as the Boers because of their agrarian culture.

Although most Africans are black, not all black people are Africans. Most importantly, not all Africans are black.⁴⁰

An Unconcluding Cultural Conclusion

Suffice it to say that the issues of identity and self-determination that underpinned the abortive and destructive policy of apartheid continue to challenge the South African nation. The jury is still out on whether the national experiment in learning to live together will provide a basis for peaceful coexistence.

What is clear is that the contextual relationship between the pieces that make up the whole—cultural, tribal, religious and economic interest groups—need to be allowed to impact on and shape the whole. To push even the smallest minority out of the equation is to invite discontent. The irony is that Kuyper, his specific intent aside and despite the prejudices that characterized his time, opened a debate that, if contextually developed and grounded in the fertile soil of Africa rather than the narrow exclusivism of Eurocentric neo-Calvinists, could have opened the way for a level of tolerance that we are only beginning to explore more than a century later.

Alternatively, do ethnic, tribal, and national foci of one kind or another, sooner or later, inevitably seek to dominate rather than share? If so, this interpretation of Kuyper is indeed, as Stackhouse suggests, not only wrong but also dangerous. But then, danger is inherent to the politics of diversity. Difference is not abating. It is here to stay, probably to grow. We need to explore ways of engaging difference in different and creative ways.

I conclude with seven one-sentence observations on culture: one, culture comes from the Latin word cultura, a word for farming that involves the complex process in which that which is given by nature is being intentionally interfered with in an attempt to create a better product. Two, we are all born into our culture; it is there waiting for us. Three, everyone's culture is in flux; we share in the changing process. Four, cultural groups are never homogeneous; we all differ from our closest kinsfolk. Five, no one finds it particularly easy to change culture; most of us are culturally a bit reactionary. Six, a dynamic culture grounded in dialogue and encounter is a liberating adventure. Seven, cultural debate and cultural evolution is reaching a new level of intensity in South Africa as well as in the United States.⁴¹ What will we look like in a hundred years' time? What will we feel like? How will successive generations react to the cocksure statements we make about truth, religious persuasion, and a notion of what is right and wrong?

South African culture, nation building, and value systems are still in the making. Few would deny this. Nation building is unfinished business. Change is the challenge of the day. This makes for a measure of tolerance and understanding in South Africa, amid even the most heated debates. Established nations that regard themselves as having run the race with the battle won, especially those within these nations who revel in the status quo, may find the challenges of change a little difficult to digest. Whatever the base from which we respond to change, this much is certain—times are a-changing. We would do well to explore and create models that have the potential to nourish us in our need to respond creatively rather to resist stubbornly. I am suggesting that Kuyperian thought, augmented with a sense of African belonging, may just be worth throwing into the stew.

¹Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1931), 199.
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²In personal correspondence, April 6, 2005.
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³Bernard Crick, In Defence of Politics (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), 54.
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⁴Ibid., 55.
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⁵Rodney Davenport and Christopher Saunders, South Africa: A Modern History (London: Macmillan, 2000); Basil Davidson, African Civilization Revisited: From Antiquity to Modern Times (Trenton: African World Press, 1991); UNESCO International Scientific Committee for the Drafting of a General History of Africa, General History of Africa, vols. 1-8 (UNESCO, Cape Town: New Africa Books, 2003); Africa Since 1990, Y. N. Seleti, ed., (Cape Town: New Africa Books, 2004).
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⁶T. Dunbar Moodie, The Rise of Afrikanerdom (Berkely: University of California Press, 1975); Herman Giliomee, The Afrikaners: Biography of a People (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2003).
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⁷W. A. de Klerk, The Puritans in Africa (London: Rex Collins, 1975), 8.
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⁸Scholars of Afrikaner nationalism suggest it was not until the late nineteenth century that this brand of theologized nationalism emerged, at which point earlier events were reinterpreted from this perspective.
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⁹Interesting in this regard is Kuyper's decision to turn away from his earlier expectations for Calvinism in South Africa, believing that the future of Calvinism lay not in Africa but in America. See George Harinck, “Abraham Kuyper, South Africa and Apartheid,” http://www.ptsem.edu/grow/kuyper/apartheid.htm (accessed August 22, 2005).
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¹⁰A. M. Hugo, “Christelik-Nasionaal in Suid Afrika,” Pro Veritate (May 1968).
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¹¹Kuyper, Lectures, 85. Kuyper's teaching in this regard was in relation to a pertinent problem in the Netherlands at the time, namely, the struggle for the right of the family to have their children taught religious knowledge in school and academic freedom in universities.
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¹²Ibid., 116.
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¹³Ibid., 96-97.
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¹⁴James W. Skillen and Rockne M. McCarthy, eds., Political Order and the Plural Structure of Society (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991), 397ff.
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¹⁵Peter Berger, Facing Up To Modernity: Excursions in Society, Politics and Religion (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 140.
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¹⁶Kuyper, Lectures, 98.
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¹⁷D. B. Robertson, ed., Voluntary Associations: A Study of Groups in Free Societies (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1966).
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¹⁸Kuyper, Lectures, 81.
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¹⁹H. G. Stoker, Die Stryd om die Ordes (Potchefstroom: Calvyn Jubileum Boekefonds, 1941), 148.
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²⁰Kuyper, Lectures, 81.
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²¹N. Diederichs, Nasionalisme as Lewensbeskouing en sy Verhouding tot Internasionalisme (Cape Town: Nasionale Pers, 1935), 19. See Moodie, Rise of Afrikanerdom, 156-64.
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²²Diederichs, Nasionalisme, 63.
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²³Moodie, Rise of Afrikanerdom, 270.
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²⁴Human Relations and the South African Scene in the Light of Scripture (Cape Town: Dutch Reformed Church Publishers, 1975).
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²⁵Wole Soyinka, Climate of Fear (London: Profile Books, 2004), 57.
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²⁶Martin E. Marty, “From the Centripetal to the Centrifugal in Culture and Religion,” Theology Today (1994): 1.
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²⁷African National Congress (ANC), “The Freedom Charter,” Reprinted at www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/charter.html (accessed August 22, 2005).
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²⁸Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 40.
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²⁹Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989).
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³⁰Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 239, 281-82.
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³¹Hannah Arendt, Crisis of the Republic (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Johanovich, 1972), 40.
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³²Martin Prozesky, “Religious Liberty in a Secular State: Some Challenges for South Africa.” Quoted in Charles Villa-Vicencio, The Spirit of Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), xiv.
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³³John Rawls, “Justice as Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 14, no.3 (Summer 1985): 25; also “The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 7, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 9-10, 18-19.
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³⁴Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), 68.
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³⁵Ibid., 61.
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³⁶In his address at the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation's Reconciliation Award Ceremony, March 8, 2000.
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³⁷Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Scribners, 1976).
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³⁸Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987), 79.
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³⁹Richard Mouw, “Some Reflections on Sphere Sovereignty,” in Religion, Pluralism and Public Life: Abraham Kuyper's Legacy for the Twenty-First Century, Luis E. Lugo, ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 88.
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⁴⁰Conference held December 4-5, 2001, www.ijr.org.za (accessed August 22, 2005).
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⁴¹James Moulder, “Moral Education in a Multicultural Environment,” Acta Academica no. 24 (1992): 17.
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  © 2005 THEOLOGY TODAY ISSN 0040-5736.