Transformative Constitutionalism

By | 25th February 2016

I’m busy preparing for my lecture on transformative constitutionalism and these poignant words of our late great former Chief Justice, Pius Langa, seemed apt given the current socio-political climate: “Social transformation is indispensable to our society. In South Africa – it is synonymous with reconciliation. If there is no reconciliation between the people and groups of South Africa we will simply have changed the material conditions and the legal culture of a society that remains fractured and divided by bitterness and hate…[A]s a society, we must keep alive the hope that we can move beyond our past. That requires both a remembering and a forgetting. We must remember what it is that brought us here. But at the same time we must forget the hate and anger that fueled some of our activities if we are to avoid returning to the same cycle of violence and oppression.”