Before 1995, 24 September was commemorated in KwaZulu as Shaka Day. When the proposed Public Holidays Bill omitted it, the IFP objected, and a compromise was reached: Heritage Day would become a national day on which South Africans could celebrate their diverse cultural heritage. Thirty-one years later, the official 2026 theme is rather fittingly “Celebrating Our Living Heritage: Strengthening the Ties That Bind Us”.
There is something constitutionally familiar in that evolution. Democratic South Africa did not attempt to solve its diversity by pretending that everybody arrived from the same past. It constructed a legal order capable of accommodating radically different pasts within a shared political future.
A ‘common’ citizenship
Citizenship sits at the heart of that project. South Africa was once a country in which the state became extraordinarily accomplished at creating different forms of belonging. The Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act of 1970 made the point brutally clear: Black South Africans were assigned citizenship of one of the so-called homelands on the basis of ethnicity, and, when some of those territories were later declared “independent”, their designated citizens lost their South African citizenship. The state was not simply recording identity; it was using citizenship itself to divide the population.
When South Africa negotiated its way out of that order, the language chosen was strikingly deliberate. The 1993 Interim Constitution spoke of creating a new order in which South Africans would enjoy a common South African citizenship. The final Constitution placed the principle in section 3, immediately after the supremacy of the Constitution itself: “There is a common South African citizenship.” All citizens are equally entitled to its rights, privileges and benefits.
Citizenship is not something that can or should be arranged according to an administrative hierarchy. A citizen by birth does not possess a more concentrated form of South Africanness than a citizen by naturalisation. A person who resumes citizenship after having previously lost it does not return as less of a citizen for it. The routes into citizenship differ because legislation necessarily regulates acquisition, loss and resumption; the citizenship that results is one and “common”. South Africans can disagree, as South Africans are constitutionally incapable of not doing, about what belongs on the proverbial braai. The Constitution is considerably less ambiguous about equality within the citizenry.
When the machinery catches up
Home Affairs is one of those institutions whose importance is easiest to overlook until it gets something wrong. Birth, death, marriage, citizenship and identity pass through its hands. For immigrants it decides status; for citizens it gives documentary expression to identity. Its computers and officials therefore perform something far more consequential than clerical administration. They translate legal belonging into everyday reality.
Minister of Home Affairs Leon Schreiber has spent the past two years trying to change how that machinery works. Much attention has understandably focused on queues, online services, bank partnerships, Smart IDs and the department’s pursuit of Digital Identity. The direction is unmistakable: fewer paper processes, greater digital access and a department increasingly designed around the proposition that citizens should not be burdened simply to prove to the state who they are. Home Affairs has repeatedly framed this reform programme in terms of restoring dignity to the experience of dealing with the department.
Yet the more interesting transformation taking place under Schreiber is one of recognition. Earlier this year, a young South African, !Khūboab Oedasoua Lawrence, received a Smart ID correctly reflecting his Khoi-San traditional name. His family had faced the problem for almost two decades because the department’s computer systems could not accommodate the characters required to spell it. Once the problem reached the minister, the IT system was changed so that birth certificates, Smart IDs and passports could recognise Khoi-San traditional names. !Khūboab did not have to alter his identity to become legible to the state; the machinery was altered so that the state could correctly recognise him. For a Heritage Day devoted to “living heritage”, it is difficult to imagine a better metaphor.
A similar principle was at work when Home Affairs changed its systems in 2025 to allow naturalised South African citizens, previously excluded by longstanding IT limitations, to apply for Smart IDs. The department estimated that the reform, which also encompassed lawful permanent residents, opened access to about 1.4 million people.
After the Constitutional Court’s May 2025 judgment confirming the declaration of invalidity of the automatic loss of South African citizenship in terms of section 6(1)(a) of the Citizenship Act, Home Affairs launched its online Citizenship Reinstatement Portal through which affected South Africans can verify and confirm their citizenship status without navigating the old paper-based process.
Beyond digital reform
That same principle should travel much further than the IT department. Digital transformation can only go so far if the administrative culture behind the screen remains unchanged. Paper can be replaced with pixels without changing the way public power is exercised. An application can move faster while the person making it still encounters an institutional instinct to treat a legal entitlement as though it were granted at the discretion or benevolence of the bureaucracy. The next phase of the Home Affairs reform project therefore requires something harder than new technology: from policy and delegations to adjudication and frontline implementation, the department itself must now move in the same direction as the systems Schreiber is changing.
This matters acutely in citizenship. Home Affairs does not manufacture citizenship according to institutional preference. It administers a legal status created by the Constitution and legislation and interpreted, where necessary, by the courts. Verification is indispensable and lawful administration requires it. But verification is not a licence to supplement Parliament, rewrite a judgment or create an unofficial hierarchy between citizens whom the Constitution declares equal.
From legacy to future
Heritage Day gives South Africa an unusually good vantage point from which to understand why. South Africa emerged from a system obsessed with dividing people into legally constructed categories of belonging and instead deliberately chose the language of common citizenship. That choice forms part of South Africa’s living heritage. Heritage need not be confined to objects, traditions and memories inherited from previous generations; it can also encompass constitutional choices that have come to define democratic South Africa: dignity, equality and a common citizenship in which the state does not recognise different degrees of South Africanness.
Taken together, these reforms point to something larger than administrative efficiency. They show a department beginning to align its systems more closely with the constitutional idea of equal citizenship. These may be administrative acts, but administration is precisely where constitutional promises either acquire practical meaning or remain words on paper. The challenge now is to ensure that the rest of the machine follows.
This matters all the more as Home Affairs moves from reforming its systems to rewriting the legislative architecture itself. The Revised White Paper on Citizenship, Immigration and Refugee Protection has been approved by Cabinet, with legislation intended to follow. As Parliament is asked to reconsider the legal framework governing citizenship and migration, the distinction between modernising the machinery and modernising the institutional thinking behind it becomes more important, not less.
Heritage is not only what a country preserves from the past, it is also what it chooses to carry into the future. South Africa’s bureaucracy has accumulated plenty of institutional habits over its long history. Not all of them qualify for heritage protection. DM
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