The Values that make things 'Tick' - Part 2

In South Africa this is somewhat different. As I said, the affirmation of human dignity is the foremost pursuit of our (envisaged) society. As South Africans we are emerging from a history of people’s humanity being denied. That was the effect of over 300 years of colonialism and apartheid. The Framers of our 1996 Constitution realised this and included human dignity not only as a founding value in section 1 of our supreme law, but also as a separate right in section 10.

The aim of this piece is not to compare and say that one society is better than the other, or that one Constitution is better than the other. This is merely an observation that I think is an interesting one, and one that ought to be considered if one is ever to make a meaningful comparison between those two countries.