On 24 September each year, South Africans celebrate Heritage Day. When we celebrate our culture and diversity of beliefs, traditions, languages and religions, we should also acknowledge that we have inherited from our ancestors a communal promise and collective commitment to work and transform together towards a country of dignity for all, healing for all, justice for all, freedom for all and equality for all.
During the negotiations for a new South Africa, a compromise was reached. Compromise in Latin literally means to together (com) promise and give assurance (promittere). The promise is a mutual promise (compromissum). Back then, we couldn’t claim the first prize, namely a new society of dignity, healing, justice, freedom and equality, but instead reached a compromise and commitment to work and transform together towards achieving this goal. This first prize was firstly drafted in the Interim Constitution of 1993, and finally adopted in the Constitution of 1996.
The ends of our communal transformation journey are inalienable dignity, the healing of many political, socio-economic and psychological wounds; achieving distributive, procedural, retributive and restorative justice; freedom from oppression and freedom for actualising all your God-given capacities and potentialities; and equality for all.
Suffice it to say that to do promise-keeping together is not easy. To embark on a journey of transformation together in a country with so many historic divisions and enmities poses special challenges. Transforming ourselves and our institutions together asks that we acknowledge and deal constructively with the different faces of complexity in our society. If we can manage to do this, we will be able to make progress on our transformation journey and keep the promise we have inherited from those who went before us.
We also need to acknowledge the plurality of perspectives, opinions, priorities, emotions, expectations and interests of the different travellers on our transformation road. These aspects are often oppositional and might seem to be incommensurable and irreconcilable since our fellow travellers are from diverse backgrounds and have different worldviews and meaning-giving frameworks.
Another face of complexity is the ambiguity, the multiple meanings of words like transformation, justice, reconciliation, together, looking back and going forward. These words have different, even opposing, meanings for different groups of South Africans. They evoke contradictory emotions. Some rejoice about the justice discourse, while others feel threatened by it. Some want to emphasise reconciliation, while others feel it is a betrayal of justice.
On our joint transformation journey, we must also pay attention to the complexity of ambivalence. We need to acknowledge that all human efforts are hampered by ambivalence, by the reality that we, on the one hand, make progress and succeed, and, on the other hand, stagnate and even regress. Looking at things in such a nuanced way would help us to advance on our journey.
Duality (not dichotomy) is another form of complexity to consider as we do joint promise-keeping and move towards the goals of transformation, towards the first prize agreed upon at the birth of our democracy. Situations that call for duality, a both/and approach instead of an either/or approach, should be discerned. One major stumbling block that causes hurt is the fact that many people struggle to say we can become simultaneously more diverse and more excellent.
Two former vice-chancellors of Stellenbosch University, Chris Brink and Russel Botman, championed the idea that an increase in diversity leads to an increase in excellence. The current vice-chancellor, Wim de Villiers, is also an advocate for excellence through a diversity of backgrounds, participants, perspectives, epistemologies, opinions and ideas.
Another dimension of complexity is paradoxicality, that is, the idea of apparent but not real contradictions. We need, for instance, to accept that even though it might sound like a contradiction, it is possible for institutions to create in innovative and imaginative ways greater inclusivity for all South Africans without producing new exclusions.
On our transformation journey, we will sometimes find ourselves in dead-end streets when no other alternatives may seem possible. It is then that we must reject that there is no alternative logic and say yes to a new and imaginative alternative logic.
Journeying and doing promise-keeping together also asks of us to embrace hybridity, not just as another dimension of complexity, but also as something that is part of our heritage. Hybridity means that we mingle with each other. This mingling is, however, not a mixing that dissolves the particular identities of people.
Hybridity implies that people from diverse backgrounds intentionally create opportunities to engage with and learn from each other so that mutual enrichment can take place; that we can keep our particular identities and simultaneously develop maximalist and self-transcending identities. Maximalist, inclusive and heterogeneous identities are free from the anxieties and feelings of being threatened as is the case with minimalist, exclusive and homogeneous identities.
On Heritage Day and beyond we should try to manage complexity on our transformation journey as this will help us to keep our communal promises to achieve a society of dignity, healing, justice, freedom and equality for all. This should be the heritage that we pass on to future generations.
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