Gender, citizenship and democracy in post-apartheid South Africa

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 24 April 1995Citizenship has become a fashionable topic for discussion amongst political theorists during the 1990s. This is not surprising, since this is the decade when Europeans have been debating in a single European Parliament a Europe with a single citizenship and a Europe with fluid boundaries. The fragmentation of the Soviet Union has created a plethora of new nation-states, as well as particularist identities which have created a desire for independent citizenship and sovereignty. In this changing context, the certainties about what 'citizenship' entails in terms of rights and obligations, both political and civil, have disappeared. In South Africa's first democratic election in April 1990, the electorate included all adults over eighteen years of age. Although the rights and obligations of citizens were not specifically debated during the negotiations, the reincorporation of former independent homelands and the extension of the vote to all adults over the age of eighteen implicitly suggested the acceptance of the notion of a universal citizenship. What debate there has been, has focused on 'effective democracy' as a means of creating citizenship. In the immediate period of transition, negotiations were concerned with creating institutional mechanisms, including the Transitional Authority to 'level playing fields' to enable all adults to vote in the" first elections