ABSTRACT
Given the previously discriminatory setting in South Africa, the call for affirmative action from the early 1990s onwards has been intended to give substantive meaning to the principle of equality as contained in the new South African Constitution (1996). In light of this, affirmative action should be seen as an instrument for the achievement of equality, in order to create the conditions for the transformation of wider structural inequities. In other words, it is a means to an end and not an end in itself.1 It provides the necessary leverage to correct past discriminatory practices and ultimately provide the appropriate conditions for addressing social, political and economic inequalities in the long term.
