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.

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.

A 'common' citizenship

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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...