Multiculturalism in South Africa: Dislodging the Binary between Universal Human Rights and Culture/Tradition

Abstract

The aim of this article is to show how the binary opposition between the cultural rights of indigenous populations and constitutionally protected universal rights leads to a closure of the discourse about these concepts. The inability to dislodge the binary is particularly damaging in post-colonial societies where the misrecognition of cultural practices may have negative implications for women, because of its impact on the redistribution of resources. By applying Nancy Fraser's concept of recognition and redistribution to the debate on customary law and land in South Africa I want to first show the complexity of gender relations in ‘multicultural’ contexts in post-colonial societies, and second, attempt to find ways of dealing with the conflict between culture and rights in a more productive way.

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this article was awarded the Wilma Rule Award for the best paper in Gender and Politics at the 22nd International Political Science Association, World Conference, Madrid, Spain, 8–12 July 2012. The author thanks all the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on a previous draft.

Notes

See also Robins (2005).

This is also the title of her book that sparked a debate published in the same book (Okin 1999).

See Himonga (2005).

Koelble and Lipuma (2005, 94) aptly put the political significance of the traditional leaders as follows: ‘Enterprising chiefs, aware of their…place in the contemporary moment—seize the opportunity invested in them by the new dispensation and the relative impotence of the nation-state to reach into rural countrysides to do in the name of custom what customarily they could not do: reformulate and historicize the concepts, practices and dispositions underpinning their claims to authority and adaptively assume forms of agency that reassert their powers and prerogatives’.

Kymlicka has pleaded for group autonomy to accommodate groups that want to determine their own political fate in general, but this has been widely criticized as unrealistic and will not be discussed here. See, e.g. Kymlicka (1995).

Laws as solutions to inequality can be viewed as problematic under liberalism, as Brown (2005) indicates. Law homogenizes its subjects, so that the intersectionalities of identities often disappear. As she puts it: ‘[T]his is why it is so difficult for politically progressive legal reforms to work on more than one kind of marked identity at once. This is why it is nearly impossible to theorize a legal subject that is not monolithic, totalized by one identity category, and cast as identical with other subjects in that category’ (Brown 2005, 139). My solution recommends parity of participation so that different categories of women can speak for themselves—at least they would be able to make inputs into the law they want. In the case of law reform in South Africa, the law is still a remedy until we can find something better.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amanda Gouws

Political Science, University of Stellenbosch, Stellenbosch, South Africa.