One of the key clauses of the Charter is headed: “All national groups shall have equal rights”. It is crucial, yet it is also controversial. Some people have argued that this clause envisages the creation of four nations – whites, Africans, coloureds and Indians, or that it works on the basis that there are already four nations in South Africa.

Now it is unfortunate that the Charter uses the word “national” in two different ways. In this clause it appears to be referring to distinct population groups, Africans, Coloureds, Indians and Whites. But in the sentence “The national wealth of our country, the heritage of all South Africans, shall be restored to the people”, the word “national” refers to all South Africans.

Lionel Forman, a leading white democrat who died in 1959, once advocated a multi-nation theory. But neither this nor the socalled four nation theory has ever been adopted as a policy within the Congress movement or in our own time by the contemporary democratic movement. This theory survives not in the Charter itself nor amongst its supporters but mainly in polemical writings against it and the democratic movement as a whole.

But what this clause of the Charter deals with (read together with the clause headed “The doors of learning and culture shall be opened”) is of considerable significance. It calls for equality in the courts, bodies of state and schools, equal language rights and the right of all people to “develop their own folk culture and customs”. While most people accept equality in bodies of state, courts and schools, the demand for language rights and the right to develop culture and customs is embarrassing to some. They feel that we are here adopting some of the worst elements of Verwoerdian cultural policy, the artificial or romantic preservation of tribal or pseudo-tribal cultures.