attention since the bone of contention had nothing to do with what to teach, research and critique. Had the issue been reflected as it was, it would not have attracted international attention and the anticipated sympathy. Presenting it as an affront to academic freedom, a long-cherished value in the academic fraternity, achieved the intended objective.
Finally, the absence of a shared political vision between the formerly enfranchised and the formerly disenfranchised is evident in political organisation, which is mainly along racial lines.
What sort of public morality are we seeing during transition?
Evidently South Africa is going through a transition where public morality is contested terrain. Sufficient evidence of the emergence of a certain type of morality has steadily been building up and already labels have begun to populate the moral lexicon. Such labels arise from the behaviour of public officials responsible for the allocation and distribution of key state resources to society. Given the rich indigenous heritage in the philosophy of ubuntu, the overwhelming common thread of charity in Christian teaching and conceptions of justice and community in Judaism and in the teachings of Mahatma Ghandi, the founders of the ANC and other liberation movements, what then accounts for the lack of internalisation of these compatible concepts in the South African body politic? In other words, why doesn’t the first set of roots described earlier dominate in South African political morality?
Empirical evidence in the chapters that follow demonstrates the contradictions of a political morality displaying the dominance of the second set of roots where an exercise in political power acts as an avenue to material possessions and monarchical tendencies expressed in riches, profligacy and conspicuous consumption. Paradoxically, evidence depicts a state in which a self-enriching elite presides over a society characterised by alienation arising from a combination of relative deprivation and poverty on one hand while demonstrating electoral support for the very agents of their plight on the other. Yet within the same contradictions arising from gross social inequalities, a strong sense of respect for the institutions of justice and law enforcement prevails in the general public and from the political elite themselves thus demonstrating a strong compliance with the legal system.
It is these paradoxes that encourage the conception of contested registers where apparently competing moral systems exist side by side, with the positive morality of transformation making attempts to create a new value system while simultaneously a critical morality in the Kantian tradition backed by ubuntu, the Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman ethic and Ghandian principles act as counter-balancing forces. The existence of a plural society together with a highly developed civil society including the plurality within the elite itself – the tripartite alliance – act as mediating forces in the creation of a new moral order. Thus, despite the morality of the politics of greed, sufficient counter-balancing forces are at work causing constant anguish in the minds of what Vavi, the Secretary General of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), calls “a predatory elite” determined to use the state as an avenue of self enrichment.
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