the traditional African collective conception of being (umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, i.e. a person is because of others or summons ergo sum, i.e. I am because we are: Mbiti, Khoza, Cardinal, Turkson, etc) hence the relationships among beings and, politically, the relationship between individuals and authority (inkosi, inkosi ngabantu bayo, i.e. a chief is because of his subjects). This philosophy both formed the basis of ubuntu, an expression of solidarity in the collective, and also determined the social relations between public officials and the general public. If inkosi was ‘inkosi ngabantu bayo’, corruption by an inkosi was a breach of this reciprocal relationship. An injury to the subjects, caused by a deliberate and intentional transgression by an inkosi as the custodian of values, defiled the office of ubukhosi (kingship) thus terminating the relationship. Inkosi could not continue to be.
Therefore, when Christianity came to Africa with its spirit of brotherhood in the body faithful, this incursion was made into fertile territory. The state enshrined the legal status of this relationship. The body faithful could not harm itself and the imago-Dei concept in the creation of human beings ushered in the egalitarian aspect in the social relations between public officials and the general public. The Greek concept of democracy contributed to the civic culture or the participatory aspect while the Roman doctrine of service prescribed the relationship between public officials and the general public. The modern state has articulated these conceptions, i.e. the western and traditional African, in the language and ethos of the west, and also provided the rules of the game in the expression of the relationships in the public domain and between public officials and the public in general.
The second set of roots is provided by the long history of political and economic exclusion on the basis of race where access to political and economic power led to a superior state of social wellbeing in the insider group. In this instance, existential experiences in the outsider group gave rise to the belief that control of political power entails access to wealth and riches, and consequently to social wellbeing. Empirically, the quality of life of white people, who comprised the insider group that controlled both political and economic power, was demonstrated in better living conditions and a superior lifestyle: beautiful suburbs, large houses, massive commercial farms, plenty of material possessions including luxury goods such as cars and other artefacts of conspicuous consumption, private investments and control over the lives of their subordinates, mostly black. Besides, whites enjoyed better health, their children seldom died as infants and adults had a longer life expectancy.
On the contrary, the quality of life of blacks, who comprised the outsider group, was demonstrated in the opposite: poverty expressed in poor housing in urban ghettoes and slums, poor and expensive transport and subsistence living conditions in rural areas, an absence of infrastructure, multiple diseases, infant mortality and a short life expectancy. There could not have been a better demonstrable effect to the equation that political power plus economic power equals social wellbeing. Since access to these two pillars of power entailed unjust means, war and conquest, exploitation and continued oppression of the outsider groups, a culture of entitlement, where moral considerations became irrelevant, developed within the outsider group. This is one dimension of the second root; the other dimension, operated through co-optation – a process of differential incorporation of blacks into the structures of political power albeit within their own affairs.
The politics of co-optation as practised by the apartheid state brought intellectual and moral mediocrity into the structures of political and, consequently, economic power. The leadership at the territorial (homeland) and local (council) levels were not necessarily the cream of black society as had been the case in the liberation movements, hence the reference to intellectual mediocrity. Moral mediocrity refers to the act of collaboration which is, indeed, morally questionable.
Not unexpectedly, the collaborating elites soon demonstrated how access to political power was a gateway to economic power and the resultant wellbeing. They became a leadership of amassment, owners of supermarkets and bottle stores, suppliers of services and entrepreneurs in other small businesses within their territorial ambit simply by virtue of exercising control over the allocation of business and trading licences. The plunder of the Transkei and the Ciskei by the Matanzimas and the Sebes, respectively, is testimony to this thesis on a grander scale, and was not limited to the two homelands. At the local level, town councillors did exactly the same. It was a lesson that the new political and bureaucratic elites were to remember very quickly, and they have revived the practice despite democracy.
What has complicated the issue is the pragmatism of CODESA together with the broad church concept of the ANC where both organisations integrated the apartheid elite into the new state thus introducing, if not augmenting, the seeds of entitlement and corruption. Admittedly, while it is generally accepted that governments and public officials in most countries are corrupt, what is remarkable in South Africa is that corruption by public officials is not accompanied by any moral anguish. It has become business as usual. The response by the outsider group to the public morality and the social wellbeing of the insider group has been in the form of utilitarian consequentialism whereby the end justifies the means.
Another complicating factor was the reaction to the political emasculation by the subordinate groups who regarded the law as merely an expression of the power relations between the rulers and the ruled. The moral consequences of legality gradually disappeared. Disobeying and breaking the law became expressions of defiance leading to the anticipated emancipation. What exacerbated this position was the tendency by the apartheid state to over-legislate in order to contain opposition to its policies and laws. With a plethora of repressive legislation to contend with, breaking the law not only became common practice, it was also encouraged as an act of overt display of resistance. Only the might of the repressive state apparatus prevented the system from degenerating into complete anarchy.
These developments had severe consequences on the national moral psyche. The law lost its moral authority after the demonstration that laws are, firstly illegitimate and, secondly, breakable. In a recent conversation, Allister Sparks, a veteran anti-apartheid journalist and an incisive analyst, reminded me that even professionals deliberately broke unreasonable laws. However, with the demise of apartheid, agents of transformation and especially government have been slow in developing programmes and with them a culture of respect for the law.
The third set of roots derives from the liberation movements and constitutes the most articulate part of the moral discourse. Liberation movements articulated the social relationship between the rulers and the ruled, provided the moral power and organisation for opposition to racial privilege, developed the vocabulary and syntax of political opposition and, finally, shaped the Constitution and consequently reflected the transformation of society. In most cases, liberation movements drew their energy from the first root of public morality in order to change the social relations and hence the existential experiences described in the second root. This could only be achieved through the destruction of the second root itself and the reconstruction of a new society in the ashes of the old. The message of political liberation was therefore emancipatory and drew its liberatory vigour mainly from the intellectual texts of African and Afro-American heroes including other notables from the African Diaspora. The texts carried two types of messages: liberation from the yoke of colonial oppression and a Pan African drive to unite descendants of the African Diaspora. Leading local intellectuals of emancipation included Tango Jabavu, John Langalibalele Dube, Rubusana, Pixley Ka Isaiah Seme, Sol Plaaitjies in the first generation and Anton Lembede, Mda, Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela in the second. They were all more African than Pan Africanist intellectuals although the two political traditions had much in common at the philosophical level, differing only on accent at the methodological and organisational levels.
Pan Africanism had its champions in W E B Dubois of the Unites States, George Padmore of the Caribbean, Marcus Garvey of Jamaica, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Leopold Senghor of Senegal besides others. Later, South Africa had Robert Sobukwe in the late 1950s and Steve Biko in the 1970s.
The African National Congress (ANC) was founded over a century ago, in 1912, and became the torchbearer of liberation. Its principal message was emancipation from
