Intellectual History in Contemporary South Africa

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiii

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2. Introduction

   • Michael Onyebuchi Eze

   Pages 1-12

3. South Africa: The Past is Another Country

   • Michael Onyebuchi Eze

   Pages 13-34

4. South African (Black) Nationalist Ideologies and Resistance Movements

   • Michael Onyebuchi Eze

   Pages 35-52

5. The “Prophets” and the “Apocalypse”

   • Michael Onyebuchi Eze

   Pages 53-71

6. When the Chickens Come Home to Roost

   • Michael Onyebuchi Eze

   Pages 73-88

7. Ubuntu: Many Voices of a History

   • Michael Onyebuchi Eze

   Pages 89-118

8. Ubuntu: A Critique of Colonial/Apartheid Reason?

   • Michael Onyebuchi Eze

   Pages 119-143

9. Ubuntu and the Making of South African Imaginary

   • Michael Onyebuchi Eze

   Pages 145-179

10. Ubuntu: Toward a New Public Discourse

    • Michael Onyebuchi Eze

    Pages 181-192

11. Back Matter

    Pages 193-220

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In examining the intellectual history in contemporary South Africa, Eze engages with the emergence of ubuntu as one discourse that has become a mirror and aftermath of South Africa s overall historical narrative. This book interrogates a triple socio-political representation of ubuntu as a displacement narrative for South Africa s colonial consciousness; as offering a new national imaginary through its inclusive consciousness, in which different, competing, and often antagonistic memories and histories are accommodated; and as offering a historicity in which the past is transformed as a symbol of hope for the present and the future. This book offers a model for African intellectual history indignant to polemics but constitutive of creative historicism and healthy humanism.

• Africa
• ideology
• intellectual history

'Among other accomplishments in this history of political thought in South Africa, Michael Eze succeeds in transcending two major approaches often taken to ubuntu, the sub-Saharan conception of morality prominent in South African socio-political discourse. One approach is that since ubuntu was an ideal way of life in pre-colonial times, it is worth reproducing today, while the other is that since ubuntu is merely a recent construction by political elites, it has no authority to guide policy. In contrast to both, Eze convincingly argues that ubuntu was part of traditional African culture prior to colonialism, but was far from ideal, and hence is something that today's South Africans should refashion collectively. Eze's 'creative historiographical' approach to ubuntu should guide all future thinking about the topic.'

-Thaddeus Metz, Humanities Research Professor, University of Johannesburg, South Africa

MICHAEL ONYEBUCHI EZE is a Research Fellow at the Kulurwissenschatliches Institut, Essen, Germany and the Editor-in-Chief of The African Communitarian: A Journal of African Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy.

Policies and ethics