We, the people of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to know:

That South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of the people

We, the people of South Africa … Believe that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity.

Among the most consistent threads in the discourse of liberation in South Africa was a commitment to non-racialism. How strong that thread was – unbreakable according to some, distinctly fragile according to others – can be debated. But from the 1955 Freedom Charter to the 1996 Constitution non-racialism has featured significantly in the canon of all anti-apartheid organisations. The same applies internationally.

But it has also become clear since democracy was ushered in, in 1994, that a critical weakness was the failure to define non-racialism, to give it content beyond that of a slogan or a self-evident ‘good thing’. It made intuitive sense, uniting races where apartheid divided them. But beyond that, what was the meaning of non-racialism? The 1996 Constitution implicitly defined it as a democratic state where the rights of every citizen are equally protected by the law. But is non-racialism the same as formal equality? Is there no more to it than that, nothing to do with the actions or moral base of individuals? Is it a passive or an active state? Are there specific types of action required of a non-racialist, or is it all left to the state or political parties or courts to resolve? For example, should the erstwhile non-racialist follow the advice of Warren Beatty (in Bulworth) when he suggested that non-racial democrats should pursue ‘… a programme of voluntary, free-spirited, open-ended procreative racial deconstruction’, by which was meant, he explained, ‘… everybody just gotta keep fuckin’ everybody till we're all the same color’?

If for some reason this fails to appeal, does non-racialism require (some other types of) pro-action on the part of the would-be non-racialist? And if so, what form should this take? Is equity or redress involved, whereby the non-racialist can or should make amends for the racialism of the past?