Whatever the benefit to any individual member of our nation, we share a fundamental responsibility to defeat the tendency in our society towards the glorification of personal wealth as the distinguishing feature of the new South African citizen, writes President Thabo Mbeki.
The great masses of our country everyday pray that the new South Africa that is being born will be a good, a moral, a humane and a caring South Africa which as it matures will progressively guarantee the happiness of all its citizens.
Because of the infancy of our brand new society, we have the possibility to act in ways that would for the foreseeable future, infuse the values of Ubuntu into our very being as a people. But what is it that constitutes Ubuntu beyond the standard and yet correct rendition Motho ke motho ka motho yo mongoe: Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu!
The Book of Proverbs in the Bible contains some injunctions that capture a number of elements of what constitute important features of the Spirit of Ubuntu, which we should strive to implant in the very bosom of the new South Africa that is being born, the food of the soul that would inspire all our people to say that they are proud to be South African.
The Proverbs say: 'Withhold not good from them to whom it is due, when it is in the power of thine hand to do it. Say not unto thy neighbour, Go, and come again, and tomorrow I will give; when thou hast it by thee.
'Devise not evil against thy neighbour, seeing he dwelleth securely by thee.
Strive not with a man without cause, if he has done thee no harm. Envy thou not the oppressor, and choose none of his ways.'
The Book of Proverbs assumes that as human beings, we have the human capacity to do as it says, not to withhold the good from them to whom it is due, when it is in the power of our hand to do it and not to say no to our neighbour, come again, and we will give you something tomorrow, even when we can give the necessary help today.
It assumes that we can be encouraged not to devise evil against our neighbours, with whom we otherwise live in harmony. It assumes that we are capable of responding to the injunction that we should not declare war against anybody without cause, especially those who have not caused us any harm. It urges that in our actions, we should not seek to emulate the demeanour of our oppressors, nor adopt their evil practices.
To the cynics all this sounds truly like the behaviour we would expect and demand of angels. All of us are convinced that, most unfortunately, we would find it difficult to find such angels in our country, who would number more than the fingers on two hands.
It may indeed very well be that, as against coming across those we can honestly describe as good people, we would find it easier to identify not only evil-doers, but also those who intentionally set out to do evil. In this regard, we would not be an exception in terms both of time and space.
Many years ago, Nelson Mandela made it bold to say that our country needs an 'RDP of the soul', the Reconstruction and Development of its soul. He made this call as our country, in the aftermath of our liberation in 1994, was immersed in an effort to understand the elements of the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) that had constituted the core of the election manifesto of the ANC in our first democratic elections.
That RDP was eminently about changing the material conditions of the lives of our people. It made no reference to matters of the soul, except indirectly. For instance, the RDP document said: 'The RDP integrates economic growth, development, reconstruction and redistribution into a unified programme. The key to this link is an infrastructural programme that will provide access to modern and effective services like electricity, water, telecommunications, transport, health, education and training for all our people. This will lead to an increased output in all sectors of the economy and by modernising our infrastructure and human resource development. We will also enhance export capacity. Success in linking reconstruction and development is essential if we are to achieve peace and security for all.' All of these were and remain critically important and eminently correct objectives that we must continue to pursue. Indeed in every election since 1994, our contending parties have vied for the favours of our people on the basis of statistics that are about all these things.
All revolutions which, by definition, seek to replace one social order with another are in the end, and in essence, concerned with human beings and the improvement of the human condition. This is also true of our Democratic Revolution of 1994.
Assuming this assertion to be true, we must also say that human fulfilment consists of more than 'access to modern and effective services like electricity, water, telecommunications, transport, health, education and training for all our people'.
As distinct from other species of the animal world, human beings also have spiritual needs. It might perhaps be more accurate and less arrogant to say that these needs are more elevated and have a more defining impact on human beings than they do on other citizens of the animal world. Thus do all of us and not merely the religious leaders speak of the intangible element that is immanent in all human beings - the soul.
Acceptance of this proposition as a fact must necessarily mean that we have to accept the related assertion that, consequently, all human societies also have a soul. To deny this would demand that we argue in a convincing manner and therefore with all due logical coherence, that the fact that individual human beings might have a soul does not necessarily mean that the human societies they combine to constitute will themselves, in consequence, also have a soul.
This would prove to be an impossible task. Nevertheless, we must accept that as in the construction of a humane and caring society entails a struggle, rather than any self-evident and inevitable victory of good over evil.
The question must therefore arise for those among us who believe that we represent the good, what must we do to succeed in our purposes? Since no human action takes place outside of established objective reality and since we want to achieve our objectives, necessarily we must strive to understand the social conditions that would help to determine whether we succeed or fail.
This relates directly to what needed and needs to be done to achieve the objective that Nelson Mandela set the nation, to accomplish the RDP of its soul. This relates to what I said in 1978 in a lecture delivered in Canada, reflecting on the formation of South African society, which was later reproduced in the ANC journal, Sechaba, under the title 'The Historical Injustice':
'The historic compromise of 1910 has therefore this significance that in granting the vanquished Boer equal political and social status with the British victor, it imposed on both the duty to defend the status quo against especially those whom that status quo defined as the dominated. The capitalist class, to whom everything has a cash value, has never considered moral incentives as very dependable. As part of the arrangement, it therefore decided that material incentives must play a prominent part.
'It consequently bought out the whole white population. It offered a price to the white workers and the Afrikaner farmers in exchange for an undertaking that they would shed their blood in defence of capital. Both worker and farmer, like Faustus took the devil's offering and like Faustus, they will have to pay on the appointed day.
'The workers took the offering in monthly cash grants and reserved jobs.
The farmers took their share by having black labour including, especially prison labour directed to the farms. They also took it in the form of huge subsidies and loans to help them maintain a 'civilised standard of living'.'
The critical point conveyed in these paragraphs is that, within the context of the development of capitalism in our country, individual acquisition of material wealth, produced through the oppression and exploitation of the black majority, became the defining social value in the organisation of white society.
Because the white minority was the dominant social force in our country, it entrenched in our society as a whole, including among the oppressed, the deep-seated understanding that personal wealth constituted the only true measure of individual and social success.
As we achieved our freedom in 1994, this had become the dominant social value, affecting the entirety of our population. Inevitably, as an established social norm, this manifested itself even in the democratic state machinery that had seemingly 'seamlessly', replaced the apartheid state machinery. The new order born of the victory in 1994 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.
In practice this means that, provided this did not threaten overt social disorder, society assumed a tolerant or permissive attitude towards such crimes as theft and corruption, especially if these related to public property. This phenomenon, which we considered as particularly South African, was in fact symptomatic of the capitalist system in all countries.
It had been analysed by all serious commentators on the capitalist political economy, including such early analysts as Adam Smith.
In despair at this development, RH Tawney wrote in his famous book, 'Religion and the Rise of Capitalism':
'To argue, in the manner of Machiavelli, that there is one rule for business and another for private life, is to open the door to an orgy of unscrupulousness before which the mind recoils. Yet granted that I should love my neighbour as myself the questions which under modern conditions of large-scale economic organisation, remain for solutions like who precisely is my neighbour? And how exactly am I to make my love for him effective in practice?
'To these questions the conventional religious teaching supplied no answer, for it had not even realised that they could be put religiously and had not yet learned to console itself for the practical difficulty of applying its moral principles, by clasping the comfortable formula that for the transactions of economic life no moral principles exists.'
In his well-known book 'The Great Transformation', in a chapter headed
'Market and Man', Karl Polanyi says:
'To separate labour from other activities of life and to subject it to the laws of the market was to annihilate all organic forms of existence and to replace them by a different type of organisation, an atomistic and individualist one.
'Such a scheme of destruction was best served by the application of the principle of freedom of contract. In practice this meant that the non-contractual organisations of kinship, neighbourhood, profession and creed were to be liquidated since they claimed the allegiance of the individual and thus restrained his freedom.
'To represent this principle as one of non-interference, as economic liberals were not to do, was merely the expression of an ingrained prejudice in favour of a definite kind of interference namely, such would destroy non-contractual relations between individuals and prevent the spontaneous reformation.'
In a foreword to a recent edition of this book, Joseph Stiglitz says, 'Polanyi stresses a particular defect in the self-regulating economy that only recently has been brought back into discussion. It involves the relationship between the economy and society, with how economic systems or reforms can affect how individuals relate to one another. Again, as the importance of social relations has increasingly become recognised, the vocabulary has changed. We now talk, for instance, about social capital.' The point made by Polanyi is that the capitalist market destroys relations of 'kinship, neighbourhood, profession, and creed', replacing these with the pursuit of personal wealth by citizens who, as he says, have become atomistic and individualistic.
Get rich! Get rich! Get rich!
Thus every day and during every hour of our time beyond sleep, the demons embedded in our society, that stalk us at every minute, seem always to beckon each one of us towards a realisable dream and nightmare. With every passing second, they advise, with rhythmic and hypnotic regularity - get rich! get rich! get rich! Many of us accept that our common natural instinct to escape from poverty is but the other side of the same coin on whose reverse side are written the words: 'At all costs, get rich!' In these circumstances personal wealth and the public communication of the message that we are people of wealth, becomes at the same time the means by which we communicate the message that we are worthy citizens of our community, the very exemplars of what defines the product of a liberated South Africa.
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.
It is perfectly obvious that many in our society, having absorbed the value system of the capitalist market, have come to the conclusion that, for them personal success and fulfilment means personal enrichment at all costs and the most theatrical and striking public display of that wealth.
The well-known financier George Soros has made statements which directly confront the crisis to social cohesion and human solidarity caused by the elevation of the profit motive and the personal acquisition of wealth as the principal and guiding objectives in the construction of modern societies.
Among other things, Soros said that in an earlier epoch, 'people were guided by a set of moral principles that found expression in behaviour outside the scope of the market mechanism.'
'Unsure of what they stand for, people increasingly rely on money as the criterion of value. What is more expensive is considered better. People deserve respect and admiration because they are rich. What used to be a medium of exchange has usurped the place of fundamental values, reversing the relationship postulated by economic theory. What used to be professions have turned into businesses. The cult of success has replaced a belief in principles. Society has lost its anchor.
'The laissez-faire argument against income redistribution invokes the doctrine of the survival of the fittest...There is something wrong with making the survival of the fittest a guiding principle of civilised society...Cooperation is as much a part of the (economic) system as competition, and the slogan 'survival of the fittest' distorts this fact.
'I blame the prevailing attitude, which holds that the unhampered pursuit of self-interest will bring about an eventual international equilibrium in the world economy.' ('The Capitalist Threat', The Atlantic Monthly, February 1997) The critical concern that George Soros has expressed is what he describes as 'market fundamentalism', the dominance and precedence of the capitalist motive of private profit maximisation which has evolved into the central objective that informs the construction of modern human society in all its elements.
Nothing can come out of this except the destruction of human society, resulting from the atomisation of society into an agglomeration of individuals who pursue mutually antagonistic materialist goals.
Necessarily and inevitably, this cannot but negate social cohesion and mutually beneficial human solidarity and therefore the most fundamental condition of the existence of all human beings namely, the mutually interdependent human relationships without which the individual human being cannot exist.
Whatever the benefit to any individual member of our nation, we nevertheless share a fundamental objective to defeat the tendency in our society towards the deification of personal wealth as the distinguishing feature of the new citizen of the new South Africa.
The Book of Genesis says, 'In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it was thou taken: for dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.' (Genesis 3:19) This Biblical text suggests that of critical importance to every South African is consideration of the material conditions of life and therefore the attendant pursuit of personal wealth. After all, what interpretation should be attached to the statement that 'in the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread'.
Perhaps strangely, this could be said to coincide exactly with a fundamental proposition advanced by the founders of Marxism, expressed by Friederich Engels at the funeral of Karl Marx in the following words: 'Just as Darwin discovered the law of development or organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc; that therefore the production of the immediate material means, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.' Putting all this in more dramatic language, Marx had said: 'Man must eat before he can think.' In this regard, Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution, said: 'Before we perceive, we breathe: we cannot exist without air, food and drink'.
Marx and Engels represented a particular point of view in the evolution of the discipline of philosophy and were not asserting any love for the private accumulation of wealth. They were 'materialists', who were militantly opposed to another philosophical tendency described as 'idealism'.
One of the most famous expressions of this 'idealism' was stated by the French scholar and philosopher, Rene Descartes, who wrote in Latin: 'Cogito, ergo sum' - 'I think, therefore I am'.
In the context of our own challenges, this 'idealism' must serve to focus our attention on issues other than the tasks of the production and distribution of material wealth.
Economic news and our economic challenges have come to occupy a central element of our daily diet of information. Matters relating to such important issues as unemployment and job creation, disbursements from the national budget and expenditures on such items of education, health, welfare and transport, the economic growth rate, the balance between our imports and exports, the value of the Rand, skills development, broad based black economic empowerment and the development of the 'second economy', have all become part of our daily discourse.
Nevertheless the old intellectual debate between 'materialists' and 'idealists', whatever side we take in this regard, must tell us that human life is about more than the economy and therefore material considerations.
As a nation we must make a special effort to understand and act on this because personal pursuit of material gain, as the beginning and end of our life purpose, is already beginning to corrode our social and national cohesion. What this means is that when we talk of a better life for all, within the context of a shared sense of national unity and national reconciliation, we must look beyond the undoubtedly correct economic objectives our nation has set itself.
In this context, most unfortunately, there is much trouble in the world.
Much too regularly all of us are exposed daily to news of human-made conflict and death and the disasters caused by poverty and natural disasters. Currently, none of us can avoid being extremely concerned about what is happening in the Middle East. What is happening in this region constitutes a tinderbox that has the potential to set the whole world aflame.
An impending catastrophe We are confronted with an impending catastrophe that is almost out of control. We must pose the question whether, even in the medium term, we are not ineluctably progressing towards the situation when the centre cannot hold. I refer here not only to the serious problems in the Middle East but to the phenomenon of social conflict everywhere else in the world. As Europe and the world sowed the seeds for the catastrophe later represented by the Second World War as in a Greek tragedy, the eminent Irish poet, William Butler Yeats, like other European thinkers, sounded alarm bells that nobody seemed to hear.
Hopefully, the warning he sounded so many decades ago will be heard today, so that, by our acts of commission and omission, we do not condemn humanity to an age of extreme misery and death that could have been avoided.
Thus do I appeal that all of us, the mighty and the lowly, hear the words of the poet not only with our ears, but also with our minds and our hearts, as he spoke of 'The Second Coming': 'Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold./ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere /The ceremony of innocence is drowned; / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity / Surely some revelation is at hand; / Surely the Second Coming is at hand. / A shape with lion body and the head of a man, / A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, / Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it / Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds / but now I know / That twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, / And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?' To ensure that things do not fall apart, we must in the first instance, never allow that the market should be the principal determinant of the nature of our society. We should firmly oppose the 'market fundamentalism' which George Soros has denounced as the force that has led society to lose its anchor. Instead, we must place at the centre of our daily activities the pursuit of the goals of social cohesion and human solidarity. We must therefore, strive to integrate into the national consciousness the value system contained in the world outlook described as Ubuntu.
We must therefore constantly ask ourselves the question - what is it in our country that militates against social cohesion and human solidarity? We would all agree that to achieve the social cohesion and human solidarity we seek, we must vigorously confront the legacy of poverty, racism and sexism.
At the same time, we must persist in our efforts to achieve national reconciliation.
Mere reliance on the market would never help us to achieve these outcomes.
Indeed, if we were to rely on the market to produce these results, what would happen would be the exacerbation of the deep-seated problems of poverty, racism and sexism and a retreat from the realisation of the objective of national reconciliation.
Then indeed would we open the door to the demons that WB Yeats saw slouching towards Bethlehem to be born - emerging from the situation where the centre could not hold, in which mere anarchy would be loosed upon the world.
We must therefore say that the Biblical injunction is surely correct, that 'Man cannot live by bread alone' and therefore that the mere pursuit of individual wealth can never satisfy the need immanent in all human beings to lead lives of happiness.
The conflicts we see today and have seen in many parts of the world should themselves communicate the daily message to us that the construction of cohesive human society concerns much more than the attainment of high economic growth rates, important as this objective is.
As we agonise over the unnecessary killings of innocent people and the destruction of much needed infrastructure in Iraq and Palestine, in Lebanon and Israel, we have to ensure that we do not slide into an era when the falcon cannot hear the falconer, when things fall apart and the centre cannot hold.
As we South Africans grapple with our own challenges, billions of the poor and the marginalised across the globe see the world ever evolving into a more sinister, cold and bitter place: this is the world that is gradually defined by increasing racism, xenophobia, ethnic animosity, religious conflicts, and the scourge of terrorism.
Our nation has begun to exhibit many critical common features deriving from a unified vision of a society based on non-racialism, non-sexism, shared prosperity and peace and stability. Yet, at the same time, we still display strong traits of our divided past with the debate about our future quite often coalescing along definite racial lines. Despite this and despite the advances we have made in our 12 years of freedom, we must also recognise the reality that we still have a long way to go before we can say we have eradicated the embedded impulses that militate against social cohesion, human solidarity and national reconciliation.
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. In a world that still suffers from the blight of intolerance, wars, antagonistic conflicts, racism, tribalism and marginalisation, national reconciliation and reconciliation among the nations, will remain a challenge that must occupy the entire human race continuously.
In our case we should say that we are fortunate that we had a Nelson Mandela who made bold to give us the task to attend to the 'RDP of the soul', and lent his considerable weight to the achievement of the goal of national reconciliation and the achievement of the goal of a better life for all our people.
Ten years ago, Nelson Mandela travelled to the Republic of Congo to assist the people of the then Zaire, and now the Democratic Republic of Congo, to make peace among them. In this regard, he was conscious of the task we share as Africans to end the conflicts on our continent, many of which are driven by the failure to affect the RDP of the African soul, to uphold the principles of Ubuntu, consciously to strive for social cohesion, human solidarity and national reconciliation.
This month the people of the DRC went to the polls to elect their president and members of the National Assembly. We must therefore say that we have arrived at a proud moment of hope for the DRC and Africa. I can think of no better birthday present for Madiba than the elections in the DRC and no better tribute to the initiative he took 10 years ago to plead with the leaders of the Congolese people that together as Africans, we must build a society based on the noble precept that - Motho ke motho ka motho yo mongoe: Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu!
Thabo Mbeki is President of the ANC and President of South Africa. This is an edited version of his address at the Fourth Nelson Mandela Lecture, University of Witwatersrand, 29 July 2006.
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