Unity for the wrong reasons reduces social cooperation to whatever happens to benefit a particular person or group, making it a zero-sum game.
New Zealand’s Sonny Bill Williams is tackled by South Africans RG Snyman (right) and Frans Malherbe during a Rugby World Cup 2019 match in Yokohama, south of Tokyo.
EPA/Kimimasa Mayama
The vision set out by Cyril Ramaphosa has the seeds for galvanising South Africans to get back on the right path. But it urgently needs a plan to make it happen.
Barack Obama delivering the 2018 Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture in Johannesburg.
EPA-EFE/Stringer
Barack Obama was asked to give the Mandela Lecture because he represents what the global liberation struggle icon stood for. He struck the right chord.
Nelson Mandela and Ahmed Kathrada share a moment in South Africa’s Parliament in 1999.
Reuters/Mike Hutchings
South African struggle stalwart Ahmed Kathrada believed in non-racialism to his core, even as others around him began to argue for an Africanist approach.
Nelson Mandela, accompanied by his wife Winnie, walks out of the Victor Verster prison on February 11, 1990.
Ulli Michel/Reuters
The foundation founded by Nelson Mandela in 1999 has done a major revision - it has written off most of his reign as comprising "grand symbolic gestures".
Vasti Roodt is Associate Professor and Head of PROSPER (Promoting Social and Political Ethics Research) in the Department of Philosophy, Stellenbosch University