The subject of human rights cannot be fully understood in South Africa outside history.
As the saying goes, “a nation that does not know its history will regress”. George Santayana, one of the world- renowned philosophers, aptly captured this saying as follows: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
This can be likened to a new CEO who arrives in a company and unilaterally makes changes without first consulting those he found there. In the process of introducing “new and innovative ideas”, such a CEO is bound to inadvertently reinvent the wheel. In other words, repeating past mistakes that derailed progress.
Within this broader context, almost three decades since the dawn of democracy in South Africa, it is important to reflect on how far the country has come in terms of either protecting or consolidating human rights.
In the event that this goal
