South Africa Wrote Its Constitution by Asking 1.7 Million Strangers What They Wanted
South Africa — Constitution Profile
| 📅 Active Since | February 4, 1997 |
| 🏛️ Government | Parliamentary Republic |
| 🌍 Capital | Pretoria (administrative) |
| 📄 Constitution Number | 5th since 1909 |
| 📜 Total Sections | 244 in 14 Chapters |
| ✍️ Public Submissions | 1.7 million |
This Is Probably Not What You Picture When You Think of Writing a Law
When South Africa sat down to write a constitution for a country that had just ended decades of legalized racial division, the people in charge of the project did something almost no government anywhere has ever attempted at this scale. The government made a public call for anyone to submit recommendations for the constitution. An extraordinary 1.7 million submissions came in.
Picture that number for a second. Not 1,700. Not 17,000. 1.7 million ordinary South Africans — farmers, teachers, students, factory workers, grandmothers — sending in their own opinions about what their country's highest law should say. Most constitutions in history were written by a small room of lawyers and politicians. This one tried, at least in part, to listen to almost two million strangers first.
Before They Could Write a Permanent Constitution, They Had to Write a Practice One
South Africa didn't jump straight from apartheid to a finished, permanent constitution. Promulgated by the Constitution of South Africa Act of 1993, it provided for a Government of National Unity, a five-year transition. It also provided for a Constituent Assembly to draft a new constitution. It is under the terms of this constitution that Mandela would become president in May 1994.
In other words, the country needed an interim rulebook just to get through the negotiation of the real one. This constitution remained in force until 1996 when the current constitution of South Africa was adopted. Nelson Mandela actually governed South Africa for nearly two years under a document everyone already knew was temporary — a placeholder built specifically to buy time for something better.
The Court Looked at the First Draft and Said No
Here's a detail that rarely makes it into the popular telling of South Africa's constitutional story. The first finished version of the new constitution did not simply sail through. On 8 May 1996, a new text was adopted with the support of 86 per cent of the assembly, but in the First Certification judgment, delivered on 6 September 1996, the Constitutional Court refused to certify this text.
The Constitutional Court identified a number of provisions that did not comply with the constitutional principles, including failures to protect the right of employees to engage in collective bargaining, and to sufficiently safeguard the independence of the Public Protector and Auditor-General.
So the very judges meant to approve South Africa's new founding document instead sent it back for revision — an extraordinary moment where the judiciary effectively told an elected assembly, representing the will of an overwhelming majority, that their work wasn't good enough yet.
They Picked One Specific Town to Sign It. The Choice Was the Point.
When the final, corrected constitution was ready to be signed into law, the location chosen for the ceremony was not random or convenient. It was deliberate, and it was personal to the country's history.
The town of Sharpeville, where in 1960 the government had massacred 69 people peacefully protesting against apartheid passes, was chosen for the signing.
Think about what that means. The same soil where police had once opened fire on unarmed protesters demanding basic dignity became the exact spot where, decades later, a Black president signed a document promising that dignity to everyone, permanently. The venue was chosen to symbolise the restoration of rights and dignity at the scene of the 1960 massacre.
One Faction Walked Out of the Room — and Stayed Out
Not every party involved in shaping South Africa's democracy actually participated in writing its constitution. The Inkatha Freedom Party, a major political force at the time, chose a different path entirely.
Rather than participate in the Constitutional Assembly on the same basis as other parties, the IFP demanded the international mediation which had been agreed as a condition of its participating in the 1994 election. Its MPs staged a walk-out from Parliament, only to return after twelve days — and then withdrew from the Constitutional Assembly for the whole of the drafting of the constitution.
South Africa's most celebrated founding document, then, was not actually written with every major political voice in the room. One significant party simply refused to take part — and the rest of the country built its new legal foundation without them.
The Rights List That Some Scholars Call the Most Generous on Earth
Once the document was finally finished, what it actually contained turned out to be exceptional by global standards. The bill of rights became the first major section in the new constitution. Many consider this bill to offer the most extensive human rights in the world.
And some of those rights were placed beyond political reach entirely. In the South African constitution, certain rights are considered so important that they are "non-derogable," meaning that they cannot ever be reduced — including equality, dignity, and life, the right to be free from torture, and the right to be free from slavery.
No future government, no matter how large its majority, can legally strip these particular protections away. They were written to outlast any single political era — including, presumably, the one that wrote them.
To Touch the Core of It, You Need Almost Everyone to Agree
South Africa's drafters also built in a safeguard against the document being casually rewritten by whoever happened to be in power later. A bill to amend the Constitution can only be passed if at least two-thirds of the National Assembly vote in favour. To amend section 1 — which establishes South Africa as a sovereign, democratic state and lays out its founding values — requires the support of three-quarters of the members.
That last threshold matters enormously. Three-quarters of an entire national parliament has to agree before anyone can touch the single sentence that defines what kind of country South Africa fundamentally is. There have been eighteen amendments since 1996 — but the foundational identity clause itself has remained essentially untouchable.
Constitution at a Glance
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Interim Constitution | 1993 (in force 1994–1996) |
| Public Submissions Received | 1.7 million |
| First Draft Adopted | May 8, 1996 (rejected by Constitutional Court) |
| Final Text Adopted | October 11, 1996 |
| Signed Into Law | December 10, 1996, Sharpeville |
| Came into Force | February 4, 1997 |
| Total Sections | 244 in 14 Chapters |
| Amendments Since 1996 | 18 |
| Amendment Threshold (general) | Two-thirds of National Assembly |
| Amendment Threshold (Section 1) | Three-quarters of National Assembly |
📥 Read the Constitution of South Africa
Read the complete, official text of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa:
👉 Read Constitution of South Africa — Official Government PDF
A constitution shaped by 1.7 million ordinary citizens, rejected once by its own courts, and signed at the site of a massacre to make a point. What part of this story stayed with you longest? Tell us in the comments below.
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