Introduction

In a conflict-ridden society such as South Africa both the stridency and the relevance of ideology are inevitably heightened. South Africa grew out of a colonial slave society, and its ruling class gradually developed an articulated ideology to justify its domination. A unique blend of Calvinist predestination, racism, paternalism, Old Testament patriarch-alism, and nationalism, this legitimating ideology became increasingly explicit and eventually grew into a full-blown model for perpetuating minority rule in a plural society. South Africa, being the extraordinarily complex society that it is, has produced three antitheses to apartheid. To simplify, we may label them ‘black nationalism,’ ‘liberalism,’ and ‘Marxism.’ In the twentieth century, South African liberalism took over Gandhist and Fabian socialist elements which again gave it a distinctive flavour, and made it very different from ‘Cape Liberalism’. Of the vast literature on South Africa, relatively little has been explicitly devoted to the role of intellectuals in that extraordinary society.