This essay argues and concludes that an interdependence of people and their cultures will better facilitate a move from multiculturality to interculturality in (South) Africa. The first part of the essay attempts a theological description of the concepts of multiculturality and interculturality. The second part discusses how interculturality can be distinguished from multiculturality. The last part proposes how the move from multiculturality to interculturality could be facilitated.

Abstract

After mapping the current notions of African agency discourse, the article suggests a more dialogical approach to the discourse, the partnership notion of African agency discourse. This suggestion is based on the view that African leaders and academics are apparently not yet ready to walk unaided. Therefore, the article proposes a broadened African agency that involves other races. Specifically, it stresses the need for a discourse that goes beyond a black identity as a category for an African agency discourse to be African proper. The essay further suggests that the contribution of the "other" in the discourse should be cherished by black and white discussants.

Nigeria, a highly populated country in West Africa, has for the past fi ve years been embroiled in turmoil. Agitation arising from displacement of a large number of people coupled with alienation in their own ancestral lands and homes, due to activities of the unpopular Islamic sect, Boko Haram (roughly translated in English as "Western education is an abomination"). Th is radical religious sect seeks in the most poignant way, to create a wide gap for its own conceived Islamic world order by killing, dispossessing, kidnapping and alienating people, especially in the north-eastern part of Nigeria, bordering Cameroon, Chad and Niger Republics. Economic, religious, cultural and political lives of the locals including Muslims are destroyed. No end is in sight. However, in the face of hostility, hatred, injustice, disorder, despair and an attempt to create order, a new form of public morality is desperately needed in Nigeria, today. Th e questions then are: what is this public morality? How can a public morality be facilitated to salvage such a disturbing situation?

Talking back' in a non-confrontational way, this essay engages the German theologian Volker Küster's 'reading' of what it views as resistant discourses from the global South. In the first instance, the essay attempts to 'read', with Küster, global political and social transformations since 1990, specifically looking at possible ways they have shaped theological discourses in the global South. Moving on, is Küster's 'reading' of a selected number of the latter discourses. The essay also attempts to highlight analytically, how Küster came to the conclusion that a shift occurred from contextualisation to the so-called glocalisation. Finally, based upon an own 'reading' of the discourses and drawing on the discussants' voices themselves, an argument is made for glocalisation in the service of contextualisation.