ABSTRACT
A recent graduate of my college spent the same time period in South Africa that I did (January to July 2000). We did not know the other was there. A difference in our experience was that I lived in a mostly white (Afrikaner) suburb of Cape Town while she lived in an all black (mostly Xhosa) township of Cape Town. We were only thirty minutes from each other, but in fact, two cultures apart. Both “aliens in a strange land”1 trying to understand ourselves in response to our different worlds; both having to learn anew how to “go up to someone.” Karen expressed her experience as follows:
This expresses simply the cross-cultural thesis of this book. I have, however, given the reader a variety of African voices to learn from and respond to. I have organized these voices in order to narrate the debates going on among African thinkers around classical and contemporary issues in African philosophy. In this way perhaps the reader will become “a participant in the dialogic process.”
