Last month, President Cyril Ramaphosa, took the pulpit and displayed qualities befitting a leader of the African National Congress — the broadest of all churches.(@PresidencyZA/X)
In his seminal essay Down at the Cross, James Baldwin recounts how, as a pastor’s kid and prodigious lay pastor in his own right, who had, from behind the pulpit, attained the status of Eminent Person, “Brother Baldwin” on the streets of Harlem as a teenager, outstripping even his father — he slowly lost his faith.
Though the horrors of life in the ghetto that had driven him to seek refuge in the church-house grew no less fierce;
“In spite of everything, there was in the life I fled a zest and a joy and a capacity for facing and surviving disaster that are very moving and very rare. Perhaps we were, all of us — pimps, whores, racketeers, church members and children — bound together by the nature of our oppression, the specific and peculiar complex of risks we had to run; if so, within these limits we sometimes achieved with each other a freedom that was close to love.”
Whereas
“There was no love in the church. It was a mask for hatred and self-hatred and despair. The transfiguring power of the Holy Ghost ended when the service ended and salvation stopped at the church door. When we were told to love everybody, I had thought that meant everybody. But no.”
Ultimately, he could no longer evade the moment when:
“I was able to see that the principles governing the rites and customs of the churches in which I grew up did not differ from the principles governing the rites and customs of other churches, white.
“The principles were Blindness, Loneliness and Terror, the first principle necessarily and actively cultivated in order to deny the two others.”
Last month, President Cyril Ramaphosa, took the pulpit and displayed qualities befitting a leader of the African National Congress — the broadest of all churches. He revealed that his government has resolved to open the grand cathedral doors and host a service that would see [dialogue] roll down like waters and [participation] like an everlasting stream.
A communion and fellowship that might just save us all:
A National Dialogue. Towards A Social Compact!
Can you imagine?
Imagine a Nation
In about 1983, Benedict Anderson described the nation as an imagined community. Every nation, he argued, can only be imagined — because it is too large and too dispersed for all its members to know one another personally. The shared stories, agreements and symbols that bind us are not based on mutual familiarity or direct relationship, but on something deeper — and more abstract.
Social contract theory was once the perfect explanation for everything. It began with a simple and poignant proposition, first most clearly articulated by Thomas Hobbes: in the state of nature, life is “nasty, brutish and short”. Without some form of collective, we are doomed. Societies are constituted when individuals recognise they cannot survive alone.
From Hobbes to Locke to Rousseau and later Adam Smith and others, Western philosophy developed this theory — not just to describe power, but to justify it. To argue we are taxed, ruled by laws and policed because a rational person would prefer this arrangement to any alternative. That life is better when we come together — voluntarily.
A hypothetical abstraction to ground state legitimacy. A tidy explanation for the existence of power and the limitations on freedom.
In the world of rhetoric — which is much of politics and, according to some linguists, all of reality — “the social contract” became a kind of blank cheque. Not so much an empty phrase — but one so loaded with rich theoretical associations and credibility … i.e. moral authority, that it could be deployed to assert any set of rights or responsibilities were not only desirable arrangements conducive to a good life, but real and binding.
But as critics of this theory have always pointed out, a hypothetical contract is not a contract at all. And even the greatest constitutional congress of all time can only produce an imagined agreement. Transformative constitutionalists go further and say that such an agreement must continuously be reimagined.
That doesn’t mean such a nation itself isn’t real. But neither does embracing the group identity and nomenclatures of liberal democratic civic nationalism make a society free. Take, for example, Israel, a brazen apartheid state, whose national ethos has for decades described itself as the Only Democracy in the Middle East. Just like the church Baldwin could no longer live with and apartheid South Africa could not have lived without.
But we live in a complicated world (of ideas). Even among progressive intellectual leaders — fully invested in the resistance of oppression and injustice — there is not much unanimity about what nations are.
UN international law expert Francesca Albanese rejects, with contempt, the much-beloved question whether Israel has the right to exist.
In a popular clip, she asserts Israel’s existence as a matter of fact and in international law. It is recognised by the UN and the state — its apparatus and control over territory — are undeniable realities.
But Albanese seems to suggest that this is a morally insignificant thing when she quips: “Tomorrow, Italy and France could decide to come together and be ‘Ita-France’” — and shrugs to suggest that would be meaningless. But as a lawyer, she must appeal to authority — emphasising that international law does not guarantee any state’s right to exist but enshrines the rights of “a people” to exist.
But this still calls into question what constitutes a people. Not just as a matter of international law, itself a body of dubious existence. What is the standard form of a social compact? If agreements of different peoples to organise and come together are morally arbitrary — say, Ita-France — maybe they are undergirded by the moral force and value of social contracts.
Contrast this with another similarly semi-viral exchange. Ta-Nehisi Coates, in a morning interview promoting his book The Message, in which he is very critical of apartheid, is badgered by an irate interviewer. The accusation is that his extremist latest book seems to deny Israel’s right to exist.
The first important point Coates makes is to explain that the substance of our systems of morality and the foundations of how power is organised, and identity is assumed and ascribed, are at base simply stories. Good stories, bad stories, true stories — and more creative imaginings.
He encourages young writers to participate in giving meaning, meaning that is constructed through language. And so, the tool is to sprint to the writer’s room — and be heard when stories are being recorded.
This opinion is echoed by South African activist Tessa Dooms, who argues that critics who believe that South Africans are “all talked out”, can only say so from a place of privilege. Most South Africans desperately need and want a seat at the table — any table. Lorenzo Davids, a leader in social development, describes a national dialogue as an act of self-healing and proposes we have one every 10 years.
But when Coates is continuously badgered by the interviewer, he offers a very different answer on the state’s right to exist. He says: “No country in the world establishes its existence through rights. Countries establish their existence through force. That’s what America did.”
He refers to the centuries-long human history where many nation-states and ethnic nationalisms were formed through histories of conquest. But in saying so, he seems to imply that it’s impossible — or pointless — to even engage in the ulterior question of the justification of a state.
Is it even possible — or necessary — to crown moral authority on a self-organised sovereign state or nation? Is the right to exist on moral terms a priori?
Albanese and Coates agree the existence of states — and presumably peoples and “-isms” — are matters of fact. But Coates focuses on whether those groups exist in the right way. His criticism of Israel is not about the material fact of its existence but its character — that of an apartheid regime which visits death and indignity upon other peoples on grounds of discrimination.
So, perhaps states are not made up of subjective group stories or even the (abstractly contractual) deliberative decision to collectivise.
In judging state legitimacy — insofar as civic nationalisms are not just social constructs and narratives in isolation — they are competing imaginations. Competing recordings and retellings. And, often, tools that further active hostilities against all those outside the church. As we try to not only propagate, but to create, peoplehood and deepen humanity by promoting, celebrating and enumerating the substance of our shared bonds — processes commonly grouped under the umbrella term “nation-building” …
At the same time, we are witnessing a singular and unprecedented attack on, not just one people’s existence, but humanity itself, in the unfolding of an unrelenting ethnic cleansing.
South Africa’s unequivocal solidarity with Palestinian lives, and recognition of mass death, is woven into the fabric of our nation state. It reflects our historic development, our understanding of exclusion and national civic identity. And yet our own nation-building and democratic project still trends towards exclusion and decline.
The South African compact
Yes, South African democracy is special. We have pulled off democratic miracles that should have been impossible.
Etymologically, the terms social contract and social compact might seem similar. But it would be a mistake not to recognise that these phrases mean very different things in the abstract tradition of European philosophy, versus what they’ve come to mean in South Africa.
Here, the compact has meant democratisation without war. At least as close as any nation could hope to get. This is part of why some are capable of asserting unity and inspiring faith.
Even if you did not grow up in the Congress, when a young nation hears “social compact”, it is compelling. Because we’ve seen what it can mean. The homepage of the Constitutional Court website recounts:
THE HISTORY OF THE IDEA
The notion of a bill of rights for South Africa can be traced back to an ANC document in the early 1920s. The Freedom Charter of 1955 carried the idea forward.
The Freedom Charter, whose 70th anniversary was last week, conveniently coinciding with the dialogue scheduled, was a successful social compact, widely regarded as the wellspring of which all freedom and justice will forever be downstream.
I recall the first written Economic Freedom Fighters manifesto contesting the ANC. The breakaway group’s core claim was not to deny the Freedom Charter’s legacy — but to claim that they and not the ANC, were its true successors in custody. Because the Charter is so deeply embedded in our national tradition that even the ANC’s fiercest critics cannot denounce it.
A later and more ultimate compact is of course the Constitution. The nation was created on the basis of that compact. The idea that the Constitution and the broader democratic compact emerged solely from the ANC is not quite right. Some might suggest a broader coalition, a united democratic front that opposed apartheid, also played a role. And while the Congress tradition informed the values and vision that shaped negotiations, the Constitution as a social compact was forged through compromises with the National Party, with capital — local and international — and under the watchful eyes of global institutions. The settlement was not only democratic, but pragmatic.
It secured formal equality. It promised representation. It promised inclusion. It gave birth to institutions which have occasionally made participatory democracy look good.
It was preceded by fora like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, whose attempts at deepening the compact of reconciliation were jettisoned by the very same politicians who devised this process. (See Andre du Toit’s recent book which details former president Thabo Mbeki’s attempts to prevent the commission’s reports ever being released.)
And it was succeeded by multiple subsidiary compacts, such as the National Development Plan, or “Vision 2030”, which for some reason the president now believes requires a new nation-building national dialogue before we can implement its vision or revise it.
Where early European philosophers used the social contract to explain why anyone should ever accept government by force, our social compacts have meant the rejection of apartheid, a broadening of political inclusion and the deliberate creation of coalitions.
So yes, it’s a romantic and transformative notion. It’s hard not to be moved — every single time it is invoked. But that is exactly why we should be cautious.
When the ANC calls for a new dialogue to form a new “social compact”, we must ask: “What nation? What dialogue? What compact?”
Elisha Kunene is a recovering lawyer and the project lead for participatory democracy at My Vote Counts.