South Africa at 30: What Lessons for Covenantal Pluralism from a Laboratory of Ubuntu and Nation Building?

South Africa’s 30 years of post-apartheid democracy are replete with lessons in constructing a paradigm of covenantal pluralism out of the conduct of struggle against the injustice of apartheid, the management of the transition to democracy, and the imagination of a constitutional governance based on the finest values. In every seminal moment on this path there was a fluidity between the political, the societal, and the religious, which became the foundations first, of reconciliation and then of co-existence of historical antagonists. Such counter-instinctive behavior was germane to the African philosophy of human interdependence—Ubuntu—which was inscribed into the post-apartheid constitutional order as the glue for a fragmented society, and an antidote to populism.