West, The ANC’s deployment of religion in nation buildingand international bodies. In many places in the world, especially in the
West, the issue of transforming humanity is not even on the agenda. In Af-
rica, you can smell it coming like the rain after drought, or the warmth of
the sun after winter.
“Somewhere ahead there beckons a civilisation which will take its place in
God’s history with other great human syntheses: Chinese, Egyptian, Jewish,
European. It will not necessarily be all black; but it will be African.” Chief
Albert Luthuli (ANC 2007b:4-5).Central to this analysis, and affirmed by the quotation from Albert
Luthuli, is the notion of an emergent form of progressive religion aris-
ing from the soil of African ubuntu but encompassing the best of each
and every religious and secular-ethical tradition. This is perhaps a tenth
distinctive feature in the analysis of religion in this Document, the flip-
side of the argument about a damaging western legacy. If western impe-
rialism is part of our problem, then the recognition and recovery of
African conceptual resources is part of our transformation. This be-
comes even clearer in the third section of “The RDP of the Soul”.
Analysing the answers
The third section of the “The RDP of the Soul” Policy Discussion
Document returns to the problems that “inhibit the progress from Lib-
eration to Transformation”, and is headed “Analysing the answers”. The
preamble to this section notes that to the list of problems discussed
under section one, section two has added another, namely “conservative
religion” (ANC 2007b:5). But the focus of the third section is on the
positive factors which are a resource for transformation, the problems
notwithstanding. The first positive factor is that oppressive empires
eventually collapse, and that there are already signs that “the oppressive
violence”, the politics of control, “the lust for wealth and power”, and
“the grim grip of right wing fundamentalist heresy” of the US Empire
are collapsing (ANC 2007b:5).
The second factor is “a new economic system”, where the Document
finally lays an RDP of the economy to rest, without it being explicitly
mentioned. The “recovery of soul in the secular world moves us on-
ward”, the Document argues somewhat obscurely, from thinking of
economics “in terms of a conflict between earlier capitalist and socialist
systems” (ANC 2007b:5). The “ongoing evolution of human society” and
the “political wisdom which led us to liberation without ongoing vio-
lence, is directing our economic wisdom to discover a new role for capi-