ABSTRACT
Since democratization in South Africa in 1994 the definition of citizenship has altered radically for the majority of South Africans who were previously excluded from a primary criterion of citizenship in republican discourse - belonging to a nation-state. Through racialization, indigenous Africans were disenfranchised in the country of their ancestors and birth. In 1994 they were included in the liberal democratic achievement of the vote, bearing a tradition where 'the citizen' is signified by an 'abstract, ungendered individual who can lay claim to certain (natural) rights' (Gouws, 1999, p.55). Further nuances of 'othered' citizen-subjects emerge in more detail as rights in the Equality Clause of the Bill of Rights in the Constitution. These focus in a more textured way on historic exclusions:
Therefore the claiming of citizenship, for example through human rights instruments, emerges in a context2 of people deeply divided by historical social relations, and is predicated on perpetuated dynamics of inequitable economic and
political power. A person's rights are not unitary and are always balanced against other people's rights, set against a background of struggles for hegemonic dominance. Moreover, rights are expressed within a particular rhetorical system which is explicitly or implicitly subtended on an ethical base, reflecting values which have wider contextual references.
