“Apartheid, that is, the white minority regime prior to 1994, was better than the present messed-up dispensation the ANC has been dumping on us over the past 29 years.”
This type of remark and the numerous variations on it are the order of the day. What is significant is that they are made mostly by irate black people – the very people who most acutely needed to escape from apartheid and who were supposed to benefit from the new dispensation.
The ANC are deeply upset by these kind of statements, so much so that at their recent election conference they decided to pay particular attention to convincing the public (or trying to do so) that, after all, apartheid really was not better than the present dystopia. However, the dismay has had a wider impact, and numerous other people, specifically including several political commentators outside the ANC circle are equally perturbed.
On close analysis, there is an essentially religious reason for the intense dismay. The advent of the new constitutional dispensation in 1994 was accompanied by pontificating a doctrine of salvation – a soteriology – that has become the South African state’s civil religion, which since then has been sermonised with so much zeal.
Therefore, the mere thought that apartheid in any respect was better than the present dispensation is even worse than simply condemnable. It means renunciation of faith and religious desertion, making a mockery of the gospel of the civil religion. It is undermining the faith in the salvation gospel.
At the heart of the South African soteriology was the intensive propagation of a new way in which the course of South Africa’s history was to be confessed.
The Epilogue under the heading “National Unity and Reconciliation” of the interim Constitution heralding the new dispensation in 1994 proclaimed the preaching of the new salvation in solemn words by stating:
“This Constitution provides a historic bridge between the past of a deeply divided society characterised by strife, conflict, untold suffering and injustice, and a future founded on the recognition of human rights, democracy and peaceful co-existence and development opportunities for all South Africans, irrespective of colour, race, class, belief or sex.”
According to this proclamation, the Constitution saved us from the evil past and provided a bridge to a new, increasingly developing glorious dispensation of “human rights, democracy and peaceful co-existence and development opportunities” for all.
Since then, this doctrine of salvation has been preached unflaggingly. The Constitutional Court has led the way by tirelessly expanding on it in numerous judgments. A chorus of politicians, political journalists and commentators have been following faithfully. It has been imprinted on students and learners thousands of times to become a generally enforced civil religion. The metaphor of the bridge – the redeeming gateway from the chains of the evil at to the deliverance of the glorified new order – also has touched the hearts of several law academics. They could hardly stop writing about it.
The Constitution – the Supreme Constitution – was the new Holy Living Word; Nelson Mandela, following a via dolorosa of 27 years, was the messiah of the doctrine of salvation; the Constitutional Court was the holy temple aptly situated on a hill in Braamfontein, from where the infallible word was to be spread to the redeemed rainbow nation; and the judges were the high priesthood interpreting and preaching the gospel of redemption; they also were the supreme benefactors of the doctrine of salvation’s promise of human rights, democracy and peaceful co-existence.
Nobody could argue against this. To do so would amount to heresy. After all, the Constitution – the scripture, as it was constantly echoing in the ears of everybody – incontrovertibly was the best in the world.
From all over, pilgrims flocked to our shores, pilgrims who desiring to pay homage to the scripture and who ascribed to the doctrine of salvation and expressed their solidarity with the blessed rainbow nation, among them academics especially from the leftist American academic circles. Leading the way was a figure, called Karl Klare – maybe not so well-known among the public, but the person whose adulation of the transformative constitution in a widely acclaimed article on transformative constitutionalism (transformationism would be a more correct designation) for years was assiduously foisted on thousands of law students – an almost apostolic figure at the forefront of the Unwise Men and Women from the West.
It is against this backdrop that the mere suggestion that the formerly white-controlled dispensation perhaps could be better than the current decay, so deeply upsets the ANC and other pontificators of the constitutional salvation doctrine, because it is not only a political statement. The suggestion disrupts the articles of faith of the constitutional salvation doctrine and baffles the doctrine’s accompanying historiography (grand narrative) as it has been proclaimed since 1994 in the Epilogue quoted above. The suggestion disrupts the simple differentiation between the horrible past and the shining new order since 1994.
The new dispensation obviously has brought about several good things. However, the first steps were also taken towards the widespread decay and calamity that the South African zombie state has become since then.
Simply contrasting, as the salvation doctrine is doing, the delinquents of apartheid and colonialism with the heroes and holy heralders of the way and establishers of the new order is equally false. Of course, there were many good people among them, but contrary to the expectation of the salvation doctrine, there also were enormous crowds of crooks, evildoers, loafers and incompetent fellow travellers. And of course, the white regime of yore did produce many bad (white) people, but also many honest, hard-working, well-intentioned and competent people who, apart from folly, also were responsible for enormously constructive work.
The doctrine of redemption’s well-doer image of human rights, democracy, peaceful co-existence and development opportunities for all turned out to be a false figment of the imagination, and its simplistic view of the unqualified evil past, likewise, was false.
Eventually, the 1994 transition turned out not to be some singular salvation. It did indeed herald significant improvements, but these were accompanied by unprecedented degeneration and failure of a neo-primitive oligarchy.
The conclusion is that the unprecedented new civil religion that was born in 1994 is now at its burial site. It cannot be resurrected from the dead by the indignation of ANC and other confessors of this religion. The foundations of their faith have crumbled.
The South African constitutional salvation doctrine has been particularly fierce and its pontification singularly intense. However, civil religions and doctrines of salvation are very old phenomena. Ideologies, political idealism and theories of state often take the form of a religious salvation doctrines.
This phenomenon has long been studied in political philosophy and constitutional theory. The political philosopher Eric Vogelin wrote at length on the religious nature of ideologies, and the jurist Carl Schmitt, at present receiving a lot of attention, and his current interpreters, such as Paul Kahn of Yale, explain that all the major concepts of modern state theory are secularised theological concepts.
These civil religions and salvation doctrines invariably are born with great enthusiasm, spend themselves, dwindle and then disappear. The eventually short-lived existence of South Africa’s unprecedented soteriology now also has come to an end.
Beyond the decayed South African state and the delusion of its disproved false salvation doctrine, organised civil institutions and the business sector are beginning to build new dispensations. They – we – are not going to save South Africa, but demarcated oases of safety and civilisation are possible – hopefully without similarly abandoning ourselves to the delusion of a new doctrine of redemption.
This article was originally published in Afrikaans in Rapport.
Prof Koos Malan is a constitutional jurist of Pretoria.
His publications include: Politocracy – An assessment of the coercive logic of the territorial state and ideas around a response to it Pretoria: Pretoria Univ Law Press 2012 (Also in Afrikaans) (The publication is freely available on the internet);
There is no supreme constitution – a critique of statist-individualist constitutionalism Stellenbosch: African SUN Media 2019.
