SA’s living heritage — Home Affairs’ reforms honour equal citizenship

There is something distinctly South African about dedicating a public holiday to heritage and then spending a good part of it debating what, exactly, is being celebrated.

Claudia Pizzocri contributes analysis, commentary and public insights for immigration and nationality law firm Eisenberg & Associates Inc.

Before 1995, 24 September was commemorated in KwaZulu as Shaka Day . When the proposed Public Holidays Bill omitted it, the IFP objected, and a compromise was reached: Heritage Day would become a national day on which South Africans could celebrate their diverse cultural heritage. Thirty-one years later, the official 2026 theme is rather fittingly “Celebrating Our Living Heritage: Strengthening the Ties That Bind Us”.

There is something constitutionally familiar in that evolution. Democratic South Africa did not attempt to solve its diversity by pretending that everybody arrived from the same past. It constructed a legal order capable of accommodating radically different pasts within a shared political future.

Citizenship sits at the heart of that project. South Africa was once a country in which the state became extraordinarily accomplished at creating different forms of belonging. The Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act of 1970 made the point brutally clear: Black South Africans were assigned citizenship of one of the so-called homelands on the basis of ethnicity, and, when some of those territories were later declared “independent”, their designated citizens lost their South African citizenship. The state was not simply recording identity; it was using citizenship itself to divide the population.

When South Africa negotiated its way out of that order, the language chosen was strikingly deliberate. The 1993 Interim Constitution spoke of creating a new order in which South Africans would enjoy a common South African citizenship. The final Constitution placed the principle in section 3, immediately after the supremacy of the Constitution itself: “ There is a common South African citizenship .” All citizens are equally entitled to its rights, privileges and benefits.

Citizenship is not something that can or should be arranged according to an administrative hierarchy. A citizen by birth does not possess a more concentrated form of South Africanness than a citizen by naturalisation. A person who resumes citizenship after having previously lost it does not return as less of a citizen for it. The routes into citizenship differ because legislation necessarily regulates acquisition, loss and resumption; the citizenship that results is one and “common”. South Africans can disagree, as South Africans are constitutionally incapable of not doing, about what belongs on the proverbial braai. The Constitution is considerably less ambiguous about equality within the citizenry.

Home Affairs is one of those institutions whose importance is easiest to overlook until it gets something wrong. Birth, death, marriage, citizenship and identity pass through its hands. For immigrants it decides status; for citizens it gives documentary expression to identity.