The constitution of South Africa

Abstract

On a hot dusty day on 10 December 1996, in a ramshackle stadium facing 4000 South Africans in the town of Sharpeville, Nelson Mandela signed a new, radical, Constitution into being. On that day, the thousands who danced and sang in the blazing summer sun came to celebrate their freedom from the vicious apartheid regime and witness the closing of the final chapter in the country's remarkable negotiated peace process. What they also witnessed was a transformation in South African identity – both locally as well as globally. While constitutions have long been understood as a way of constituting a people I propose that they also serve as a performative rhetorical space in which the nation-state constitutes itself among a community of nations. Constitutions are never alone for the nation, though that is an important function of a constitution, but in a modern globalized world serve as an integral component of a nation's international identity as well.

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