Spirituality, Leadership and Social Transformation : the pedagogical role of multicultural leadership in post-apartheid South Africa

Abstract

Practical theology in the 21st century requires a new pedagogy to address multicultural challenges. Multiculturality encompasses a subversive agency for monocultural and 'silent minority' landscapes as well as an identity pedagogue for the three publics. South Africa, for example, has to deal with the dichotomy of a multicultural society and a resistant monocultural 'laager' mentality of minority races. The three publics in South Africa has to reconfigure its cultural "positional and situatedness" in the world (Zimmerman et. al 2011). The previous apartheid ideology systematized all societal activity along racial separatism. The current democratic dispensation seeks a new (African) culture for humanity. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Nelson Mandela's vision for the 1995 Rugby World Cup inspired and formed social cohesion and an emerging new multicultural society. How we understand and embody the relationship between faith, culture and public life, affects issues of racial and sociocultural transformation. The task of practical theology is to reflect on diverse contexts and in developing the formative and transformative role of spirituality in diverse contexts (Wolfteich 2009). Spirituality is a social phenomenon and has social and leadership implications for a multicultural community. This paper seeks to reflect critically on spirituality and leadership praxes in search of meaning forming multicultural communities. Leaders as frontier-crossers and spirituality as identity formation offer an ideal analytical framework to address complex cultural, ethnic and social challenges