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The African continent is associated with a variety of problems. Irrespective of having achieved a new democracy more than two decades ago, South Africa still seems to suffer the same fate as the rest of the continent because of the inability to solve its innate challenges. However, at grass roots level South Africans are desperately seeking ways of moving away from this problem-focused paradigm to a more constructive and assertive paradigm where South Africans can truly be reconciled as a ‘rainbow nation’ despite the different cultures. Scholars who have written about this intercultural challenge are of the opinion that intercultural hermeneutics no longer works with a split between Christ and culture, but rather with the interconnectedness between Christ and culture, without the sacrifice of the culture’s uniqueness. One cannot understand religion, faith and spirituality without understanding culture. This article investigates the church’s responsibility to provide pastoral care to the people of South Africa within an intercultural paradigm by using different symbols and metaphors. The research question concentrates on the interconnectedness of the Christian faith and the different cultures in South Africa. It examines how a pastoral approach, using symbols and metaphors, could contribute to the avoidance of the mere ‘Christianisation’ of the culture, resulting in an approach where Christ is the authentic transformer of culture.

A certain brand of fiction has become popular in post-apartheid South Africa that accounts for the relative success of Susan Mann‟s “One tongue singing” (2005). This article seeks to examine the implications of narratives such as this in revealing the normative assumptions that might inform text and reception a decade into a new democracy. It begins with an overview of whiteness studies as a post-colonial frame of reference useful in gauging the continued hegemonic normativity of whiteness as a cultural affiliation. This is followed by an analysis of Mann‟s novel. I argue that it is precisely in fiction such as this – massproduced for a white middle-class, mostly female readership both here and abroad – that there is ample evidence of the kinds of normative assumptions that whiteness studies attempts to make visible. I demonstrate that despite the writer‟s liberal and politically correct attempts to negotiate the politics of race, gender and class, her narrative inadvertently reinforces stereotypes that it ostensibly challenges. Thus it exhibits the discursive limits and powers of the most readily available reading matter this country has to offer.