Ubu and Ubuntu: On the dialectics of apartheid and nation building

Post-apartheid South Africa has seen a resurgence of cultural nationalism, presenting itself in the form of Ubuntu. Instead of developing democratic institutions and a viable democratic culture, an obsession with nation building has developed, the nature of which, and the strategies of exclusion that are employed to promote it, is contrary to the development of democracy. The continuities from cultural nationalist ideologies of the apartheid era into the post-apartheid present reveal this clearly. The nationalist ideology of Ubuntu glorifies an imagined past. With its emphasis on community values, it promotes an attitude of conformity. The ambivalent relationship between the process of truth and reconciliation and the project of nation building is also analysed in this article.