For many South Africans the recent xenophobic violence betrayed fundamental values of community, inclusion, participation and ubuntu and confirmed just how far we are from the democratic society imagined by those who wrote the new Constitution in the early 1990s.

That Constitution created a common and inclusive citizenship, finally granting all South Africans the basic right of citizenship – the right to vote for a government of one's choice. However, the 1993 (interim) Constitution contemplated more than political freedom. It imagined an inclusive and participatory democracy, a new society based on human rights and democratic values. In the words of the late Constitutional Court Justice, Ismail Mahomed, this was no ordinary constitution seeking merely ‘to formalise, in a legal instrument, a historical consensus of values and aspirations, evolved incrementally from a stable and unbroken past to accommodate the needs of the future’. On the contrary, it ‘represent[ed] a decisive break from … the past … and [expressed a] commitment to a democratic, universalist, caring and aspirationally egalitarian ethos’. The court, and many lawyers, judges and human rights activists came to describe this Constitution – and its 1996 successor – as a transformative document which guides South Africa as it seeks to ‘[h]eal the divisions of the past and establish a society based on democratic values, social justice and fundamental rights’.

The commitment to transformation that lies at the heart of the new constitutional order is guided by the democratic values of human dignity, the achievement of equality, and freedom. It is also guided by the spirit of ubuntu – expressed by the Constitutional Court as

The constitutional aspiration of a transformed society envisages engaged compassionate citizens within an open, transparent and accountable state. Its reach extends beyond a narrow idea of a community of citizens to a broadly caring society, inclusive of all who live here.