Page:Fourie v Minister of Home Affairs (SCA).djvu/6

Rh of race infected not only our national life but the practice of law and our courts' jurisprudence at every level.

Yet despite this rank history, the negotiating founders determined that our aspirations as a nation and the structures for their realisation should be embodied in a constitution that would regulate contesting claims through law. This decision embodied a paradox. Though apartheid used legal means to exclude the majority of this country's people from civic and material justice, the law—embodied in a detailed founding document—would now form the basis for our national aspirations. This paradox lies at the core of our national project—that we came from oppression by law, but resolved to seek our future, free from oppression, in regulation by law. Our constitutional history thus involves— ‘a transition from a society based on division, injustice and exclusion from the democratic process to one which respects the dignity of all citizens, and includes all in the process of governance’.

In expressing this vision of our future, the founders committed themselves to a conception of our nationhood that was both very wide and very inclusive. In this lay a further paradox: for the very extent of past legal exclusion and denigration now