Event location: Senate Hall, North Campus
Event date and time: 30/04/2026 13:00:00
Bringing together legal, racial and political perspectives, the discussion challenges assumptions about who belongs in South Africa, encourages reflection on how inequality and scarcity are framed, and aims to promote dialogue that supports social cohesion and a more inclusive understanding of democracy.
The discussion aims to explore the tension in South Africa’s constitutional democracy between universal human rights and rights tied to citizenship, using the case Rafoneke and Others v Minister of Justice and Correctional Services and Others as a brief illustrative example. In that matter the Constitutional Court upheld provisions limiting admission to the legal profession to citizens and permanent residents, even though the affected foreign nationals were lawfully residing in South Africa and held valid permits to work in the country.
The discussion uses this as a starting point to reflect on how legal frameworks and democratic institutions construct ideas of belonging and exclusion, and how these intersect with broader social dynamics such as xenophobia, Afrophobia and ethnophobia.