Post-apartheid Society Research Articles

Revisiting the Master-Signifier, or, Mandela and Repression.

The concept of the master-signifier has been subject to a variety of applications in Lacanian forms of political discourse theory and ideology critique. While there is much to be commended in literature of this sort, it often neglects salient issues pertaining to the role of master signifiers in the clinical domain of (individual) psychical economy. The popularity of the concept of the master (or “empty”) signifier in political discourse analysis has thus proved a double-edged sword. On the one hand it demonstrates how crucial psychical processes are performed via the operations of the signifier, extending thus the Lacanian thesis that identification is the outcome of linguistic and symbolic as opposed to merely psychological processes. On the other, the use of the master signifier concept within the political realm to track discursive formations tends to distance the term from the dynamics of the unconscious and operation of repression. Accordingly, this paper revisits the master signifier concept, and does so within the socio-political domain, yet while paying particular attention to the functioning of unconscious processes of fantasy and repression. More specifically, it investigates how Nelson Mandela operates as a master signifier in contemporary South Africa, as a vital means of knitting together diverse elements of post-apartheid society, enabling the fantasy of the post-apartheid nation, and holding at bay a whole series of repressed and negated undercurrents.

Narratives of Post-Apartheid Gender Deconstruction

This essay aims generally at examining the relationship between literary discourse and nation-building. In specific terms, the aim has been to show the place of the post-apartheid South African woman in the development and progress of her nation. Using the theoretical paradigm of liberal feminism, the premise is defended that woman in post-apartheid society, as she is depicted in None to Accompany Me, Red Dust, and Playing in the Light, is not a passive observer of political and social issues in her society. Rather, she is a veritable partner for national development, nation-building, and social progress. Consequently, she also participates in the development of South African society alongside her male counterpart. The above authors thus portray the South African woman at the nucleus of policy-making and decision-taking in her society. This affirmative portrayal reinforces the view that gender construction is an old dogma and should be discarded for meaningful development to flow in the post-apartheid context.

“We are all children of God”: a Charismatic church as space of encounter between township and suburb in post-apartheid Johannesburg

Twenty years after the first democratic election in South Africa, Johannesburg is still marked by the legacy of apartheid. This makes it difficult for residents of former townships and of suburban middle classes to interact in everyday life. Nevertheless, urban dwellers create or use spaces with the intention of living up to the ideal of a non-racist post-apartheid society. The case study of a Charismatic church in Linbro Park, in the north-east of Johannesburg, analyses how the white, middle class church leadership conceives of the church as a public space of the Christian rainbow nation. The experiences of township dwellers show, however, that subtle processes of exclusion are at work. The article argues that this post-apartheid space of encounter is fraught with contradiction, tension and ambivalence, a space where urban dwellers transgress, but also reproduce racial and class-based boundaries.

The Long Walk: Considering the Enduring Spatial and Racial Dimensions of Deprivation Two Decades after the Fall of Apartheid

This study examines the enduring spatial and racial dimensions of poverty and deprivation in South Africa to assess the progress made by the post-apartheid society and state. A multi-dimensional approach is required to assess progress because it can reflect the reduction in deprivation attributable to the improved affordability and expanded coverage of government services. While there has been previous studies tracking poverty trends over segments of the post-apartheid period, no previous work has considered multi-dimensional deprivation over the two decades following the official fall of apartheid. We adopt the Total Fuzzy and Relative approach proposed by Cheli and Lemmi (1995) to derive a poverty index with nine dimensions of deprivation, including education, employment, dwelling type, overcrowding, access to electricity, water, telephone, sanitation and refuse collection. Our analysis shows that there has been a significant improvement in South African deprivation levels between 1996 and 2011, but it also finds that geography and race continue to play an important role in explaining patterns of deprivation.

The Long Walk: Considering the Enduring Spatial and Racial Dimensions of Deprivation Two Decades after the Fall of Apartheid

This study examines the enduring spatial and racial dimensions of poverty and deprivation in South Africa to assess the progress made by the post-apartheid society and state. A multi-dimensional approach is required to assess progress because it can reflect the reduction in deprivation attributable to the improved affordability and expanded coverage of government services. While there has been previous studies tracking poverty trends over segments of the post-apartheid period, no previous work has considered multi-dimensional deprivation over the two decades following the official fall of apartheid. We adopt the Total Fuzzy and Relative approach proposed by Cheli and Lemmi (1995) to derive a poverty index with nine dimensions of deprivation, including education, employment, dwelling type, overcrowding, access to electricity, water, telephone, sanitation and refuse collection. Our analysis shows that there has been a significant improvement in South African deprivation levels between 1996 and 2011, but it also finds that geography and race continue to play an important role in explaining patterns of deprivation.

An exploratory critique of the notion of social cohesion in contemporary South Africa

This article seeks to situate the increasing salience of social cohesion in the context of the transition from apartheid to a post-apartheid society. It first part of the article focusses on the changing political and economic landscape post 1990. It pays particular attention to the role of Nelson Mandela as a symbol of national unity. While the fact that the African National Congress (ANC) government's economic policies under his leadership failed to have a fundamental impact on levels of poverty and inequality, Mandela's stature and ability to reach out to different constituencies created the conditions for him to be seen as a great unifier. His successors Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma have also not had much success at the level of alleviating high levels of poverty and inequality while also not enjoying the same iconic status of Mandela. Starting in the Mbeki era but gaining momentum under the Zuma Presidency, the country has witnessed rising levels of community and labour unrest. In this context, the article argues that notions like social cohesion and ubuntu have assumed increasing importance as ways to stitch together a fracturing society. The latter part of the article argues that, with high levels of poverty and inequality, commodification of basic services and mounting social protests, it is difficult to deploy ideas like social cohesion, especially when new militant political subjectivities are challenging the hegemony of the ANC.

The South African Student Exchange Program: Anti-Apartheid Activism in the Era of Constructive Engagement

After the Soweto Uprising and the murder of Steve Biko, activists in South Africa and the United States created the South African Education Program (SAEP) in 1979 to bring black South African students to the US for university education to prepare them for leadership in post-apartheid South Africa, bringing over 1,500 students by 1995. Some of these students were activists in South Africa; others encountered the liberation movements for the first time at the orientation in the US. Many of them contributed, along with other South Africans, to the divestment movement on US campuses. SAEP students also gained intellectual confidence from their US studies, with alumni now playing prominent roles in transforming post-apartheid South African society. While this program did not directly contradict the Reagan policy of Constructive Engagement with apartheid South Africa, it enabled personal liberation and activism that contributed to ending apartheid. The SAEP provided a space for American universities to contribute to South Africa’s democratic future and nurtured young black South Africans in the history of apartheid and the struggle against it and provided them with language to speak truth to power.

Ethnicity in discourse: the interactional negotiation of ethnic boundaries in post-apartheid Namibia

To what extent can ethnic boundaries be transcended in interethnic interactions? We are tackling this question in reference to Namibia, a post-apartheid society marked by a legacy of ethnic and racial divisions. Relying on discourse as a source of data, we identify the strategies employed by Namibians in a range of interview data and semi-experimental interethnic interactions for either accentuating or attenuating interethnic boundaries. We identify these strategies at the levels of ethnic categorization, language choice/variation and the management of speaker turns, and place them in the perspective of the participants' perspectives on ethnic Others. Our findings suggest that ethnic categories are salient in our data, although they do not exclude identification with superordinate categories in specific contexts. Our findings also show that patterns of categorization are reflected in language choice and turn management in the interactional context.

The aftermath of oppression: in search of resolution through family photographs of the forcibly removed of District Six, Cape Town

Reflecting on a body of family photographs from forcibly removed ex-residents of Roger Street, District Six, Cape Town, I shift frames, from aesthetics to restorative justice, to open a set of questions around trauma, memory and freedom in the aftermath of oppression. Intimate documents of family life, the photographs speak of the destruction of community and of the multiple valencies of place and home. They also speak of historical catastrophe and of the unfinished business of apartheid. Approaching the notion of archive as being open-ended, and not bound in time and space, I suggest a principled and forceful space for engaging a set of debates that lie at the centre of post-apartheid society, even as they are generally disavowed.

Beyond the ‘After Math’: exploring psychological decolonisation in a post-apartheid context of artistic praxis

This article argues that recontextualising applicable theories of Frantz Fanon through knowledge-seeking art practices can contribute to the ‘decolonisation of the mind’ in a contemporary South African context. The multimodal social intervention, entitled ‘After Math: An Exploration of Temporality, Wounding and Consequence’, hosted by the Apartheid Museum in August 2012 (principal artist and curator Farieda Nazier), is discussed and analysed. The exhibition and this retrospective article are grounded in Nazier's explorations and subsequent application of Fanonian theories and broader postcolonial postulations of place, gender and class. The intervention borrows from Fanon's theories and phenomenological approach to racial discrimination, using them as a point of departure to evoke memory and convey personal struggles within an apartheid and post-apartheid society through a number of visual and embodied modalities.

Barriers to inter-organisational collaboration amongst performing arts organisations in South Africa

There is significant financial pressure on the performing arts sector in South Africa. Demand for the performing arts sector needs to grow if this is to change. This requires inter-organisational collaboration. This study explores, through a grounded qualitative approach, the barriers to inter-organisational collaboration amongst performing arts organisations (PAOs) in South Africa, as seen through the experience of strategic leaders in the sector. These included views from commercial producers, theatres, festival and independent companies, and performing arts promoters. These organisations were professionally run with paid staff. The findings are then compared with the emerging literature in the field, conclusions drawn and recommendations made. Barriers identified include personal pride, artistic ideology, the survivalist reality, fragmented audiences and lack of support from government. The contextual complexity of South African post-apartheid society also acts as a barrier to collaboration. Ideas from the literature for overcoming these barriers are included. For practitioners, the problem of inter-organisational collaboration in the performing arts was identified. It appears as if inter-organisational collaboration (as a means of stimulating primary demand) is constrained when the financial pressures on a sector are so great as to push organisations into a corner. For academics, this study makes a contribution to the literature that is part of a broader relational and ‘shared-power’ turn in leadership studies, where collective action is increasingly required. The strong importance of contextual barriers confirms the call for an increased ‘field-level’ analysis.

Currents against gender transformation of South African men: relocating marginality to the centre of research and theory of masculinities

South African research on men, boys and masculinities appears to be underachieving. The article presents a number of research-related and socio-political discursive cross-currents tied to this unconvincing performance. These are currents within and against which masculinities are produced and masculinities research conducted. They are seen as opposed to changing gender power relations and the transformation of boys, men and masculinities in post-apartheid society. The inventory of these currents is intended to be taken as signposts of the ongoing struggle for dominance among the forces pressing against the project of changing gender power relations and men's transformation. The article suggests that while there are obvious hegemonic ideas about masculinity in the country, these ideas are complicated by the marginality of (South) African society in juxtaposition to powerful multinational capitalist ideologies. It is contended that what we might be in need of are culturally-intelligent studies and activism on men in their locatedness in their marginal worlds. A door into gaining better access into masculinities located in this zone of marginality and representing pro-feminist work with men and boys as pro-African is the critical re-deployment of the notion of ‘(the) tradition/al’ as constitutive of masculinity.

“You Are Suffering from Literary Kwashiorkor”: Transculturation at the Confluence of African Literature, Vegetarianism and Indigenous Ritual Practice in Nape ’a Motana’s Son-In-Law of the Boere

SummaryOn the surface, Nape ’a Motana’s fictional work Son-In-Law of the Boere (2010) is a tale of love between a black “Jim-comes-to-Jo’burg” stereotype and a white Afrikaans female teaching colleague during a transitional era in South African political and social history. However, as this article will reveal, the text is a compelling and transformative narrative which should be read as a literary transculturation of three veins of social discourse: (1) the literary historiography of African literature and the provision of access for contemporary readers to the African literary archive, (2) vegetarianism as a metaphor for transformation in a postcolonial and post-apartheid society, and (3) the representation of indigenous ritual practices in the modernity of liberation-era South Africa. Furthermore, the novel suggests that access to African fictional texts and a corps of motivated educators in South African schools would go some distance toward developing the necessary literacies to overcome the “literary kwashiorkor” referred to in the title of this essay.

Nation-Building, Africanism and the 2010 Fifa World Cup: what did they do for social cohesion in post-apartheid South Africa

This paper addresses issues of nation-building and Africanism as seen through the lens of South Africa’s hosting of the 2010 FIFA World Cup. It discusses the challenges posed to social cohesion and critically examines the shift in South Africa’s national identity toward Africanism through the World Cup. The paper draws upon some findings from the Gauteng City-Region Observatory’s (GCRO) 2010 FIFA World Cup longitudinal study as reference points for the paper. The research was conducted amongst a sample of small and micro-entrepreneurs in Gauteng in order to gauge the expectations and impact of the FIFA World Cup on small business in the province. Such key findings from the research include the contention amongst 92 per cent of respondents that Ghana’s performance in the World Cup ‘brought (us) together as Africans’, while 62 per cent of respondents responded positively to the statement that ‘foreigners are taking our benefits’. This data is indicative of South Africa’s ambivalent relationship with the African continent and allows a critical perspective on the prospects for social cohesion in a post-apartheid society. The paper concludes by reflecting on the impact and meaning of the World Cup for South Africa and its ambitions to unite South Africans behind both a nation-building project and an Africanist agenda which looks to mobilise the African continent.

Review: African Identity in Post-Apartheid Public Architecture: White Skin, Black Masks, by Jonathan Alfred Noble and At Home with Apartheid: The Hidden Landscapes of Domestic Service in Johannesburg, by Rebecca Ginsburg

Jonathan Alfred Noble African Identity in Post-Apartheid Public Architecture: White Skin, Black Masks Farnham, UK, and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2011, 314 pp., 135 b/w illus. Cloth, $124.95, ISBN 9780754677659 Rebecca Ginsburg At Home with Apartheid: The Hidden Landscapes of Domestic Service in Johannesburg Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011, 248 pp., 37 b/w illus. Cloth, $35.00, ISBN 9780813928883 It can be argued that nowhere during the twentieth century were the spatial dimensions of politics more nakedly visible than in South Africa. Even before the official adoption in 1948 of apartheid and its detailed laws governing racial classification and segregation, the South African state enforced policies of forcible resettlement and restricted movement aimed at ensuring strict separation of its population. The built environment played a key role in establishing racial identities and maintaining segregated spheres, and the legacy of this social rupture remains clearly visible in the architecture, cities, and landscapes of South Africa. Two important new books by Jonathan Alfred Noble and Rebecca Ginsburg add significantly to our understanding of the design disciplines’ relationships to apartheid. Noble and Ginsburg explore the spatial dimensions of South African politics from very different perspectives. The former analyzes specific examples of state-sponsored architecture designed to represent a fully integrated, post-apartheid society, while the latter examines domestic spaces in middle-class Johannesburg during the 1960s and 1970s in order to study closely apartheid’s concerns with gender, labor, movement, and visibility. Both books are rooted in the extensive research of their authors’ doctoral dissertations and make significant contributions to the growing body of literature on the built environment in modern South Africa. Noble examines five projects built since the end of apartheid in great depth in African Identity in Post-Apartheid Public Architecture . The diversity of architectural expression he discusses reflects the broad range of concerns driving South African architecture and landscape architecture. Most important among these is the question of how to represent a pluralistic, post-apartheid democracy and its multitude of regional cultures, geographies, and climates. Noble highlights the importance of design competitions in South Africa, which he portrays as a democratization of the design process analogous to the country’s political reforms. The author, …

Art and culture in contemporary South Africa

This article focuses on the complex ways in which artistic innovation and creativity have been fostered by the experience of living in late apartheid and post-apartheid society. It argues that contemporary South African artists, film-makers and performers have developed highly inventive formal and conceptual vocabularies in their effort to negotiate the ever-changing landscape of contradictory and sometimes irreconcilable realities they encounter on a daily basis, often attaining major international acclaim in the process. Blurring the boundaries between long-established artistic genres, and challenging racial, sexual and other stereotypes, they have refused to abandon the hope of achieving the ideals of a renewal and respacialization of the current socio-cultural landscape. Many of them have done so against the odds of vociferous opprobrium from state officials and legal challenges by the ANC, which in recent years has questioned the right to freedom of expression of a number of artists.

African Language Literatures: perspectives on isiZulu fiction and popular black television series by Innocentia Jabusile Mhlambi (review)

Reviewed by: African Language Literatures: perspectives on isiZulu fiction and popular black television series by Innocentia Jabusile Mhlambi Gugulethu Mazibuko (bio) Innocentia Jabusile Mhlambi (2012) African Language Literatures: perspectives on isiZulu fiction and popular black television series. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. This text gives a new approach to African languages and literatures that moves away from traditional theoretical models of structuralism and new criticism. It interrogates artistic expressions that through time embody ‘authentic proper sensibilities of Africans’ (16) in South Africa. Popular art, a loose category that embraces old and new cultural forms and which draws influences from the eclectic South African experience, is also closely analysed as a form of literature. The line between the oral and written is blurred as the significance and relevance of repetition, anecdotes, jokes, allusions, parody, overlaps, migrations and recycling of textual elements is analysed in different contexts. Emerging black films in African languages are also explored as reflective of the contemporary post-apartheid society offering new readings in line with the socio-economic and political realities of the day. The interplay between tradition and modernity, changing gender roles, subcultures, the role of patriarchy, and the musings and escapisms of subalterns are some of the issues that this text brings to the fore from these genres. Chapter One, ‘Proverbs in narratives: seeing the contemporary through archaic gazes in Aphelile Agambaqa and Impi Yabomdabu Isethunjini’ gives short summaries of the two narratives and then explores the central and complex role that proverbs play in them. It weaves through the use of proverbs as an oral art form and as a reading strategy. They become plotting strategies when as titles of narratives they ensure that the narrative follows [End Page 106] already established story lines or routes. Their traditionally embedded moral imperatives and nostalgic laments are woven through topical issues that the narratives raise, like changing gender roles and politics, patriarchy, family and post-apartheid society. The use of folktale motifs as a way of structuring the moral lessons of the story and the invitation that is usually extended to the reader to apply these to interpreting life is the main focus of the next chapter. Folktale patterns are juxtaposed to traditionalism, its didacticism and new gender patterns; narratives that are heavily indebted to folktales that favour traditional conservatism are presented with a sting in the tail: gender identities have changed “women have agency, make their own decisions; parental influence over offspring is receding and independence and selfhood the new end striven for goal. Selfhood is redefined as not just belonging but being before one chooses to belong. The third section deals with the influence of oral forms like praises and naming. Naming is recognised as an integral part of Zulu culture which becomes not only a stylistic form but a moral, prophetic and self-fulfilling act that is usually encapsulated in a name. Naming, in this case, as explored with regard to Masondo’s detective trilogy, disrupts expectations and de-stereotypes archetypal presentations whilst the stories generally reflect the waning confidence in the South African law enforcement agencies; they successfully deal with the issue in a fresh light through the effective and new use of the naming strategy. For example, new names and meaningful nicknames are invented, while names whose conventional meaning emphasised all that is negative, inferior, dehumanising, mocking, derogatory are totally devoid of such associations here and actually even represent the direct opposite. The final chapters – ‘A world in creolisation: inheritance politics and the ambiguities of a very modern tradition in two black South African dramas’, ‘Thematic re-engagements in the television series Gaz’Lam and isiZulu literature’, and finally ‘“It is not a crime the way you see it”: Kuyoqhuma Nhlavana’s rewriting of Yizo Yizo’s crime discourse and outlaw culture’ – explore new themes in various SA television series that are socially engineered around nation building and social cohesion embedded in neoliberalist policies. While there is interplay between tradition and modernity, they attempt to provide a platform for contesting African experiences in the post-apartheid contemporary society. Residues of cultural elements are fossilised in the limited creolised middle ground whilst the capitalist success is mediated by a popular discourse. Media almost...

Creating co-sovereigns through the provision of low cost housing: The case of Johannesburg, South Africa

The decision to build social housing often hinges on two considerations, economic cost and social need. Although these considerations are vital, there is an alternative use for such housing, that of creating empowered and emancipated citizens. In South Africa, the urban dispossessed live under an apartheid legacy that denied them the dignity of property ownership. In this context, the provision of social housing will not only contribute to the physical and economic wellbeing of residence but equally contribute to creating citizens who feel emancipated and have a sense of entitlement through home ownership; these citizens become more than just residents of social housing but rather co-sovereigns of the country, a co-sovereign being a citizen who feels they have a right to own and possess the country they live in. This empowerment through housing provision moves past grand nation building symbols, such as national stadiums and monuments that have been the staple of South Africa post-apartheid national-building and looks at the emotional benefits of social housing, that of the sense of ownership and belonging. This is particularly important in South Africa and can contribute to the development of a more inclusive post-apartheid society.

On the Tragedy of the Commoner: Elektra, Orestes, and Others in South Africa

Like their counterparts in other countries beset with internal conflicts if not outright civil war, such as Jean Anouilh in occupied France (ca. 1940) or Griselda Gambaro in Argentina (ca. 1980), South African theatermakers during the apartheid era found in classical tragedy scenarios for representing the struggle against the brutality of an authoritarian state. Sophocles' Antigone, in particular, which inspired both Anouilh and Gambaro, also prompted the well-known South African playwright Athol Fugard, as well as lesser-known locals like Peter Se-Puma, to depict Antigone as a political rebel who defies Creon, her kinsman and her king, and asserts on pain of death an ethical obligation to resist the tyranny of the state. (1) In The Island (1973), Fugard's collaborators Winston Ntshona and John Kani, both of whom created the roles of political prisoners, play Antigone and Creon respectively. The drama concludes not with death but with defiance, with Winstoffs endurance despite his life sentence, John's anticipated release and, by implication, the amplification of this defiance in the world outside. In this scenario, the hero and her drama represent not so much tragic sacrifice as commitment to struggle. The darkness of tragedy, the fatal outcome of the collision between hubris and necessity, appear to fade in light of prospective liberation. If the commitments of the antiapartheid movement encouraged a theater of resistance whence the suffering protagonist emerged transformed as an agent of struggle, the achievement of democracy in the post-apartheid era might appear to have escaped the threat of catastrophe and thus the grasp of tragedy. Invoking tragedy in this context may invite the argument that South Africa avoided the calamity of full-blown civil war, and achieved instead a relatively peaceful transfer of power in 1994. (2) Moreover, so the argument might continue, the historically divided population has come, as a result of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as well as lesser known but far-reaching changes in law, economics, and education, to understand itself as a nation. Even if the TRC's final report could not produce a universally sanctioned truth or full consensus about the legitimacy or illegitimacy of acts of violence committed by the apartheid state or its opponents, which might have led to collective reconciliation, the hearings compelled those who paid attention to reevaluate their place in the country after apartheid) This aspiration to national belonging invites the representation of resolution if not quite reconciliation. If this representation does not rise to the rounded form of high comedy, defined by the resolution of conflict and harmonization of difference rather than by eliciting laughter, then it might still offer the redress proposed by satire, or the critical resolution of the Brechtian parable play, through which the audience comes to see beyond characters blind to history and their own contradictions to reach an understanding of social conflict and its potential redress. (4) Despite the strong appeal of resolution, the comedic scenario has only partial purchase in today's South Africa. The persistence in post-apartheid society of inequity and injustice perpetuated by new rulers, even if they were former victims, prompts a skeptical revaluation of the official narrative in which the African National Congress (ANC) claims the moral high ground of a national hero. As the wealth gap increases, poverty remains entrenched, and death stalks the country in the shape of AIDS, assaults on women and children, and criminal violence out of all proportion to the value of property being stolen, the epic narrative of national liberation and the victory of justice over oppression have been cast into doubt. As expressed by a recent book, Do South Africans Exist?, some have become skeptical about the very identity of a national protagonist. (5) Many local theatermakers have used satire to indict the corruption, impunity, and indifference of the newly powerful. …

Looking Backward, Looking Forward: Race, Corrective Measures and the South African Constitutional Court

How should the law address the effects of past and continuing racial discrimination? On the one hand, the fact that the law contributes to the production of our lived reality, that the law helps to construct the individual subject, his or her identity, the knowledge that it is possible to have about the individual, the limits of our understanding of the place of the individual in society, the deployment of racial categories in law can contribute to the perpetuation of the very race-based hierarchy that is the cause of the “problem of race” in our society. On the other hand if racial categories are not deployed in legal discourse and in the legal provisions aimed at addressing the effects of past racial discrimination and the continued dominance of an ideology of white dominance, the law may well fail to address the effects of past racial discrimination and the ongoing problem of racism and racial oppression. In this paper I contend that South Africa’s Constitutional Court – while not always alive to these dangers – has embraced a view that the South African Constitution is historical self-consciousness in order to assist it with its interpretation of the various provisions of the Constitution and to signal the contingent nature of its interpretation. I explore the manner in which the Constitutional Court has dealt with racially-based corrective measures against the background of the Court’s understanding of the South African apartheid past and the lingering effects and consequences of this apartheid past on the post-apartheid society. I argue that although the Court has not always demonstrated a sufficient degree of care when deploying racial categories and, hence, that its jurisprudence could be read as endorsing a rather essentialist view of race, its jurisprudence also gestures at the need for a contingent and critical approach to race when engaging with the problem of race-based corrective measures and its limits. I discuss the Constitutional Court’s jurisprudence on constitutionally permissible (or required) race-based corrective measures and point out that the way the Court deals with this question – most notably in the way it situates its jurisprudence within the context of a specific historical event (the transformation from an apartheid state to an egalitarian non-racial state) - opens up a space for a constructive engagement with legally mandated race-based corrective measures to avoid some of the pitfalls highlighted above.