Johannesburg — MORE and more people, across racial and ethnic lines, are yearning for cultural group identities to enhance their sense of worth as human beings. This largely reflects growing material and spiritual poverty and pervasive alienation, especially among the youth.

Black students on former white campuses have culturally or ethnically based societies that would have been condemned before 1994 but that are as necessary now as the emergence of the black consciousness movements previously. Most of these students have little participation in their own cultures and languages; this has a bearing on their self-image, academic performance and prospects in later life.

The quest for cultural identity is also a sign of the deepening political crises in our society. The state is adrift and uninspired, the product of a compromise among political parties that presents no ideological content, vision or insight. The pendulum is swinging back to valuing positive culture and group self-determination. This is not nostalgia or neoconservatism, nor a return to the divisions and animosities of apartheid. It is a reaction to the overemphasis on licentious human rights, which has undermined cultural heritages and social frameworks.

The yearning is for cultural orderliness and vitality, community stability and social dynamism, material provision, human dignity and assured identity. With the overall disarray, impoverishment and uncertainty, these have become crucial. And so is the need for an ideological framework that provides honesty, clarity, inspiration and direction in politics.

The debate on culture precipitated by President Jacob Zuma 's morally troublesome personal life is conflating two interrelated but distinct issues: morality and culture. The latter is being speciously exploited to justify infringements of the former, while the debate has degenerated into cultural relativism as though there were no universal human criteria in assessing cultural content and relevance. It also assumes that every aspect of a culture is irreproachable and always relevant.

There is also a fortuitous and exploitative approach to culture. The "conservatives" remain silent when some elements are rubbished but are eager to defend or champion some relics for personal interests, as is obviously the case with Zuma. If cultural discussions are earnest, they should engage blacks in reckoning with their overall heritages and not regress to suit personal, and even sexual, indulgences.

Much cultural winnowing is required to remove the irrelevancies. Most blacks no longer engage fully or significantly in their traditional cultures; this has contributed to cultural indifference, alienation or abuse. No definite, overarching and organically developed and relevant new black culture for contemporary guidance and inspiration has emerged.

Yet its development is imperative; indeed Africa needs a cultural revolution to engage blacks radically and organically in modernity. Circumstances demand this. For a start, polygamy must be discontinued. Given AIDS, poverty and overpopulation, most blacks have abandoned it. Among senior Zulu comrades, Zuma is probably the only polygamist left.

Cultural realities cannot be separated from economic and other considerations. Polygamous men produce too many children and this imposes heavy burdens on society in the provision of jobs, hospitals, schools and other modern facilities absent in traditional, mainly rural, environments. Objective conditions must therefore determine cultural relevance.

Notwithstanding the abuse of culture and ideology, both are essential. Like bullion to currency, they underpin the value of human personality and social cohesion, political deliberations and actions. Their absence or minimal presence leads to social, moral and political depreciation, or even collapse.

There is now a floundering generation largely deprived of cultural values and rules, as well as ideological or political principles and norms. There should be a cultural and ideological restoration and refinement to inform and inspire national deliberations and actions that will enrich and sustain individuals and communities, as well as the political and business environments.

Mabogoane is a freelance journalist.