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    The Ubuntu God: Deconstructing a South African Narrative of Oppression
    The Ubuntu God: Deconstructing a South African Narrative of Oppression
    The Ubuntu God: Deconstructing a South African Narrative of Oppression
    Ebook279 pages3 hours

    The Ubuntu God: Deconstructing a South African Narrative of Oppression

    By Samuel A. Paul

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    In 1948, the Afrikaner Nationalist Government became the ruling party in South Africa and instituted the brutal system known as apartheid. To maintain their power, Afrikaners drew on Christian scripture and traditions to create self-justifying religious narratives that supported their oppressive ideologies, prohibiting inclusion and suppressing pluralism. In time these Afrikaner-Christian narratives began to unravel as counter-narratives within the Christian tradition influenced the Black church to demand equality and democracy. This socio-political and cultural transformation is best understood and interpreted through the vision of ubuntu: a mode of thought in African culture that places a value on humanity in community and shifts the focus from singularity to plurality in South African society.

    In The Ubuntu God, Samuel A. Paul traces how the dismantling of apartheid led to recognition of the religious other, the recovery of alternate narratives, and the reappearance of ubuntu perspective and practice in the political and public sphere. After the peaceful transition to a democratically elected government, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission created a platform for multiple voices, stories, and religious narratives to be shared in a public political context. This multiplicity of voices resulted, ultimately, in the formation of a new constitution for South Africa that sought to uphold African values of community and inclusion in its institutions. While South Africa's apartheid system and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission are both rooted in the biblical narrative, the former used its theology to enforce an iron rule while the latter combined Christian and African concepts to create a pluralistic and open society. Such a society is characterized by a culture that emphasizes communality and interdependence.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPickwick Publications
    Release dateJan 1, 2009
    ISBN9781630878207
    The Ubuntu God: Deconstructing a South African Narrative of Oppression
    Author

    Samuel A. Paul

    Samuel A. Paul is a Research Associate with the University of Southern California's Center for Religion and Civic Culture, Associate Director of Digitial Resources at the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, and remains an ordained minister with the Apostolic Faith Mission Church, South Africa.

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      Book preview

      The Ubuntu God - Samuel A. Paul

      9781556355103.kindle.jpg

      The Ubuntu God

      Deconstructing a South African Narrative of Oppression

      Samuel A. Paul

      2008.Pickwick_logo.jpg

      THE UBUNTU GOD

      Deconstructing a South African Narrative of Oppression

      Princeton Theological Monograph Series 101

      Copyright © 2009 Samuel A. Paul. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

      Pickwick Publications

      A Division of Wipf and Stock Publishers

      199 West 8th Avenue, Suite 3

      Eugene, Oregon 97401

      www.wipfandstock.com

      isbn 13: 978-1-55635-510-3

      eisbn 13: 978-1-63087-820-7

      Cataloging-in-Publication data:

      Paul, Samuel A.

      The Ubuntu God : deconstructing a South African narrative of oppression / Samuel A. Paul.

      Princeton Theological Monograph Series 101

      viii + 186 p. ; 23 cm. Includes bibliographical references

      Eugene, Ore.: Pickwick Publications

      isbn 13: 978-1-55635-510-3

      1. South Africa. Truth and Reconciliation Commission. 2. Reconciliation—Religious aspects—Christianity—History of doctrines—20th century. 3. Apartheid—South Africa. 4. Apartheid—Religious aspects—Christianity. 5. Liberation theology. 6. South Africa—Church history—20th century. 7. South Africa—Politics and government—1948–1994. 8. South Africa—Politics and government—1994–. I. Title. II. Series.

      dt1757 .p38 2009

      Manufactured in the U.S.A.

      Princeton Theological Monograph Series

      K. C. Hanson, Charles M. Collier, and D. Christopher Spinks, Series Editors

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      Acknowledgments

      First, I acknowledge the political activists and families who underwent imprisonment, interrogations, house arrests, beatings, exile, and the ultimate sacrifice of death, to pursue democracy in South Africa. Their perseverance and conviction led to the fulfillment of their goal on April 4, 1994 when South Africans all over the world cast their votes to elect Nelson Mandela president.

      I am grateful for R. D. Naidoo, an uncle of mine. Known as RD to all his comrades, he spent most of his life banned as a political activist and under house arrest for his clandestine work with trade unions and the South African Communist Party. As a child, I remember visiting his home and wondering why only my parents were allowed to visit with him for a few minutes in his room with the door slightly cracked open so we could get a brief glimpse of him while my siblings and I waited in the lounge. After finishing high school, I could not afford to go to college, my father negotiated a job for me with RD. Working as a bookkeeper, I soon learned that I was keeping the books for banned underground trade unions in Durban, South Africa, and my politicization and recognition of the evils of apartheid began. Thank you, RD, for opening my eyes; I wish you were alive to know what an impact you made on my life and how you influenced this research project.

      To my colleagues at the University of Southern California’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture, thank you for all your support in affording me the time and funds toward this project. To Alison Lowell, graduate student and research assistant at USC, who spent weeks formatting and preparing the manuscript to meet publisher deadlines, your assistance was invaluable, thank you so much.

      Finally, Eva Peters and Malathi Benjamin, without your help, support, and encouragement throughout the journey, this book would not have been possible. Thank You!

      Abbreviations

      Introduction

      I awoke early on the morning of April 4, 1994, a day that I had waited with great expectation for more than three decades. Dressing in a hurry I left the house with a sense of urgency in order to beat the Los Angeles rush hour traffic and position myself in front of a very long line of people at the South African consulate. On this special day I, a Colored South African of Indian descent, would cast my vote for the first time and participate in the electoral process of a free and democratic South Africa.

      In the early hours of that momentous morning South Africans living in California gathered at the South African consulate in Beverly Hills, not to voice any protest but to add a new chapter to the books of history. Words could not express the emotions that overcame us as we realized that we, the Colored and Black citizens of South Africa, would finally belong to a place, a people group, a culture and gain or regain our sense of identity. Despite the fact that we were casting our vote in California we finally belonged to the country of our birth, as full citizens of South Africa. Thank you Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisuli, Ahmed Katrada, Govan Mbeki and all those who fought, struggled, faced imprisonment and died for that day. Out of this struggle came liberation for all, for me and my fellow Black and Colored South African brothers and sisters. I got to vote that day. I was now recognized and acknowledged as a democratic free citizen of South Africa. Later that evening I was overwhelmed with tears of unutterable joy as I watched news coverage of the day. I watched myself on television sharing thoughts of my identity with a reporter. It was an unfolding of my African Indian Christian narrative which had always been rather confusing to say the least. I was no longer just an Indian who was born in South Africa because the British shipped my great-grandparents there in the early 1860s to toil as slave laborers on sugarcane plantations. Because I was not a citizen of India I was not Indian, and yet, because I was not White I wasn’t South African. Just as the Afrikaner was a Christian, I was a Christian, too. Yet in the South Africa of old that did not give me any equal or fair standing despite the New Testament assurance that we are all equal in Christ. So, who am I really? Why is my narrative so different to that of my fellow Afrikaner citizens? How could the Afrikaner find support for apartheid in the Biblical text? These questions and many more have plagued me for most of my life like a demon possessing my thoughts. I embarked on this project in an attempt to fully understand this Afrikaner narrative and to make sense of my very own meta-narrative. Through this study I intend to expose the Afrikaner’s oppressive self-serving religious narrative of apartheid with 1948 as my starting point until the events leading to the formation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1996.

      In 1948, the Afrikaner Nationalist Government became the ruling party in South Africa. Under its rule, the political and legal system was noted for its totalitarian interference in the affairs of people’s private lives. A policy of separate developments was introduced in which the government restricted the freedom of Blacks.¹ Apartheid, the separation of, and discrimination against people based solely on the color of their skin, was introduced. The state determined where people lived, where they could own property, who they could marry, which schools they could attend, and what jobs could be performed by what races. The state dictated which sport clubs people could join, and against whom they could compete. The state regulated which hospitals people could attend, and dictated that blood transfusions were permitted only within one’s own race. The state stipulated which church people could attend, and at death, where they could be buried. Apartheid was in total opposition to basic human rights.²

      The term apartheid literally means apart-ness or separate-ness. It gave a minority regime, elected by one small section of the population, an explicit mandate to govern in the interests, and for the benefit of the White community. Such a policy was hostile to the common good of people as a whole, denied the fact that all human beings were made in the image of the Creator, and failed to acknowledge equal dominion over the earth for all.

      Christianity has always been a dominant influence in South Africa. Afrikaners drew heavily on Christian scripture and the Christian tradition to weave a self-justifying religious narrative that supported their oppressive ideologies, prohibiting inclusion and suppressing pluralism. At the same time, the focus of the Black Church during this time was to develop and assert a theology that insisted that equality and democracy were attainable, amidst discrimination, brutality, intimidation, violence, poverty, imprisonment and loss. Indeed, in 1990, Nelson Mandela was released from almost 28 years of imprisonment for his active political resistance against the apartheid government. His release indicated that the totalitarian government could no longer maintain its policy of apartheid. After four years of intense negotiations between the Afrikaner National Party (NP) and the African National Congress (ANC), South Africa became a democracy in 1994 and Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as the country’s first Black President.

      It is a historical fact that the apartheid government abused its power, and participated in some of the world’s most atrocious human rights violations. It did so while maintaining its ideological justification of a Christian narrative. The ANC, on the other hand, a Marxist influenced party, led the country to democracy through the medium of Ubuntu as seen in the processes of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), utilizing the fundamental Christian principles of confession, repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation for the purpose of healing and building the nation.

      The struggle for racial freedom and liberation in South Africa took place, in part, on a discursive level. Though liberation struggles throughout the world have been forced to grapple with the self-justifying myths of their oppressive regimes, I believe this was truer in South Africa than elsewhere. This project begins with an interrogation of the Afrikaner-Christian narrative that provided the ideological underpinnings for apartheid. I point to the shaky biblical basis of this narrative, specifically to its untenable over-reliance on Romans 13:1-4. Then, I demonstrate how this self-justifying, exclusivist narrative began to unravel through the struggle for liberation in South Africa, an unraveling that both paralleled and was inspired by a global movement within Christian theology originating in the Third World that challenged all versions of colonialist Christianity. The unraveling of the Afrikaner-Apartheid Christian narrative represented the breaking open of religious discourse in the public arena and allowed for a multipli-city of religious narratives, voices, and stories to emerge. This process of story telling culminated in 1996 with the TRC, which sought to bring healing through full and honest disclosure of culpability.

      In this project I identify this discursive shift from singularity of narrative to plurality as Ubuntu, an African word meaning humanity to others, and more fully defined later. Though one might engage the topic of Ubuntu from a cultural, anthropological, or sociological perspective, I employ the term theological. That is, I point to the spirit of Ubuntu at work in the South African context. I identify Ubuntu as a powerful, autonomous force in the dismantling of apartheid, and a spirit radically present at the TRC.

      As part of the negotiations, in exchange for power, the NP wanted blanket amnesty for the crimes committed during its tragic period of apartheid and asked for a Reconciliation Commission to be established. The ANC, on the other hand, wanted a Truth Commission. One was interested in the perpetrators of the crimes generated by apartheid, and the other was concerned with the victims of the apartheid regime. In 1995, the ANC initiated TRC, which sought truth and offered reconciliation.

      Apartheid and the TRC were both rooted in the Biblical story. Apartheid united the concepts of manifest destiny and redemptive violence to support a divisive culture of suppression of the majority by a minority. In contrast the ANC conveyed Ubuntu through the TRC by adopting the Biblical stories of prophetic justice and transformative justice through repentance and forgiveness, to bring about unification and to invite reconciliation. These competing concepts are the reverse sides of the same theological reality, which is that manifest destiny (entitlement) is the reverse of prophetic justice, and redemptive violence is the reverse of transformative justice. The Constantinian commitment to extending the Kingdom of God in the nation, which empowered the Reformed theology of the Afrikaner tradition, created the national seedbed for planting a commission inclusive of all groups. Where the parochial, racial, exclusive, and narrow view of redemptive justice prevailed, the TRC sought transformative justice.

      Much scholarly work has been done on apartheid in the past fifty years, and most recently on the TRC. However, I offer a unique emphasis both on narrative during apartheid and on the role of Ubuntu during the liberation process.

      The methodology utilized in this study is African Narrative Theology. I have chosen this theological methodology because it offers an inclusive and integrative way of addressing issues of culture, class, racial exploitation, oppression, and poverty. African Narrative Theology is deeply rooted in African culture, and more specifically, in the extensive resources of the oral tradition communicated through stories within the South African culture.

      Stories provide the fertile soil of South African religions because they bud, grow and flower with deep spiritual, theological, and philosophical insights and visions of humanness. Historically, storytelling has formed the bridge between traditional African religiosity, the African worldview and the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. Narrative theology, as it brings together the wisdom of oral tradition, transmitted history, and lived experience of morality, community and humanity, provides a broader and more inclusive socio-political account of the South African story and its theological meaning and is, therefore, the most appropriate and useful method for this study. This project is also grounded in several key premises.

      First, the South African historical, political, social, economic, cultural, and theological context is best understood and interpreted through the vision of Ubuntu philosophy, theology, and thought. Ubuntu is an African philosophy and way of life. Ubuntu, a word deriving from the Nguni languages, expresses the very high value of human worth which is found within African societies, and conveys a concept of humanism rooted not in western individualism but in a communal context. It is a concept expressive of a culture that places emphasis on communality and on the interdependence of the members of a community; a concept which conveys the belief that each individual’s humanity is truly expressed through his or her relationship with others and theirs in turn through a recognition of his or her humanity.³ Sociolinguist Buntu Mfenyana argues that to understand fully the word Ubuntu one must separate the prefix ubu from the root ntu:

      Ntu is an ancestor who got human society going. He gave us our way of life as human beings. It is a communal way of life which says that society must be run for the sake of all. This requires cooperation, sharing, and charity. There should be no widows or orphans left alone—they all belong to someone. If a man does not have a cow, then give him a cow to milk. There should be no deprived person.⁴

      Ubu refers to the abstract. So Ubuntu is the quality of being human. It is the quality, or the behavior, of ntu society that is, sharing, charitableness, and cooperation. It is this quality which distinguishes a human creature from an animal or spirit. When you do something that is not humane then you are being like an animal.⁵

      Ubuntu, which means humanity in Xhosa and human nature in Zulu offers the conceptual paradigm of solidarity as humans with fellow humans, which serves as a spiritual foundation for all South African indigenous cultures. A key phrase that expresses this solidarity is, a person is a person through other persons.⁶ Ubuntu is a corporate and communal way of life that stands in direct opposition to the hierarchical, discriminatory, separatist and systemic class warfare of apartheid. This individualistic either-or reasoning of the apartheid state ignored the communitarian lifestyle of the African ethic. Thus, heinous crimes are the antithesis of Ubuntu. The peaceful transition from hegemony to negotiations for democracy corresponds to the neither-nor ideology, which is deeply rooted in Ubuntu philosophy. It neither left the status quo intact as the reformers had hoped for, nor did it reverse power relations as the revolutionaries had expected. The philosophy of Ubuntu lends to and is consistent with narrative, which is storytelling in a community context.

      Second, that apartheid’s dominating hegemony forced upon the South African society homogeneity of norms and enforced absolutism in values which denied the full human dignity, the moral integrity, the historical actuality and the essential spirituality of the other. Treatment that is cruel, inhuman or degrading is bereft of Ubuntu. Ubuntu thought demands that one apprehends and appreciates the faith of the religious other; it transcends absolutism and brings to bear the distinct South African sensibility of respect for and treatment of human beings as being-with-others and it offers a new definition of what being-with-others shall henceforth be about. Ubuntu operates as an ethic of responsibility and reciprocity. It captures how the relation to the other is prior to the self. In other words, one becomes who one is in responding to, and for, the other.⁷

      Third, and most important for this project, that the dismantling of apartheid led to recognition of the religious other, the recovery of the alternate narratives of the South African pluralistic and diverse context, that is to the reappearance of Ubuntu perspective and practice in the political and public sphere.

      The central theological and moral spine running through the experience of what the Christian Church offered in South Africa can best be described with a string of words linked, like vertebrae, as a social-political-legal-economic-moral-and-theological narrative of the South African experience deconstructed to reveal a movement toward liberation manifest in the following impulses:

      1. Believers, struggling to make sense of Christian faith in the midst of the old narrative of oppression and separation, finding a transforming principle through a reconciling narrative that reflects elements of Ubuntu thought;

      • Interpreters, struggling to make sense of Biblical texts addressing political roles and their ethical realities, finding an alternative African perspective on Romans 13 as a case study;

      • Thinkers, struggling to bring together the warring opposites of the past, finding a meta-narrative for South African peoples in the Ubuntu vision which offers a hermeneutics of liberation and a social process for actualizing it in the healing of the sub-nations within a nation;

      • Leaders, applying pathways and patterns of healing in Ubuntu thought, creating a new narrative of truth telling and reconciling the oppressor and oppressed;

      • Religious leaders, finding that the ultimate work of Ubuntu is the creation of a solidarity that reaches beyond a pluralism of coexistence and lays hold of a new narrative of solidarity that embraces diversity, community and inclusivity in the search for a reconciled future.

      Elements of Ubuntu principles can be seen as intrinsically present in the South African journey from 1948 through 1994. South Africa is historically unique, theologically instructive and stands as a light to the nations. It is Ubuntu that gave the South African people courage which culminated, not in denial of the horrors of the past, but in amnesty, truthfulness, integrity and a communal collective solidarity in African society that did not allow for the sacrifice of truth or reconciliation. It was Ubuntu that led them from a hopeless situation of exploitation and abuse to communal solidarity. This powerful thread and need for tribal connectivity in African culture is a sense of truth that is far more existential and a relational necessity than the Afrikaner’s idea of transcendent universal truth and its long history of relational exclusivism. The African hope for relational inclusivism was the only solution that brought this country together. Ubuntu brought out the best of both and forced them to face the worst of both. This is a larger and

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