The Chosen Path

The central question addressed in this chapter is: Could a society within which racism is so systemically embedded bring forth negotiations sufficiently attune to exposing and addressing the fundamental nature of South Africa’s order and being? Here it is shown how the negotiation process witnessed the National Party government’s rather incoherent group-based consociational position give way to a more compelling set of arguments for creating a constitutional state that would be compatible with the African National Congress’s (ANC’s) clearer designs for a non-racial constitution. The important insight drawn out with respect to this process is that it was primarily driven by both the ANC’s imperative to obtain full political and legal rights for African people and by the National Party government’s priority to secure and protect the freedom of the Afrikaner people while holding true to the spirit of neo-Calvinist political thought—but that in all this there was no clear sighted engagement with how the apartheid project had created and embedded a systemically racist society.