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THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE CONSTITUTION AND ‘THINGS AFRICAN’

What happens when a liberal democracy encounters a politics of difference that it cannot embrace ethically or ideologically within its definition of the polity? This article attempts to make sense of the way in which struggles over ‘culture’ in post-apartheid South Africa have emerged from a concrete, ongoing history of difference. It argues that this history edges uneasily from an excoriation of ethnicity and ‘things African’ to pleas for the necessity of their recognition. It also shows that it is a history that sheds light on the vicissitudes of the life and times of the nation-state at the turn of the new century.