Over the past few years, the question around the coloniality of the South African state has been elevated to national discourse by young people, who through demonstrations of discontent with the status quo, have sought to reimagine a different civilisation. This reimagination arises from the realisation that the South African state is confronted with persistent structural problems inherited from the past, problems which impede on the state’s ability to cleanse itself of some of the more significant remnants of our colonial and apartheid past. Public Affairs professor, Maserumule, contends that "the intersection of a neo-liberal approach and a colonial edifice eroded the state’s capacity to fulfil the mission of the liberation struggle" (Maserumule, 2018a). This intersection finds expression particularly in how the state deals with the question of constructing a united identity for South Africans who for many decades, were a people at war with themselves.
The importance of annihilating the edifice of coloniality that Maserumule so aptly describes lies in the understanding that by its very nature, coloniality is rooted in segregation, structural racism and the maintenance of zones of exclusion. This has direct implications for the architecture of a truly united nation, and more importantly Black people’s sense of belonging to this nation that has been gestating in the mind of the democratic government but is yet to be born. For Black people who have been historically excluded from South Africa, both through denaturalisation in the apartheid era and persistent disenfranchisement in the new dispensation, a sense of belonging is tied closely to legitimate claims to meaningful citizenship.
The Cambridge Dictionary defines citizenship as "the state of being a member of a particular country and having rights because of it". This is perhaps the most apt definition of the term, one which recognises the state of being a citizen not simply as belonging to a country but having inherent rights as a result. The importance of rights is linked with the fundamental question of dignity, for it is in the realisation and respect of basic human rights that a government can truly claim legitimacy, and a people, citizenship.
But can Black people in South Africa truly make claims to citizenship when daily, their material conditions hurl them further to the edge of the periphery of economic and political activity? Maserumule (2012) argues that "democracy in conditions characterised by inequalities in socio-economic gains is not sustainable, particularly in South Africa with the history of many decades of systematic marginalisation". This argument is at the heart of our contention that persistent structural racism impacts on Black people’s sense of belonging and claims to legitimate citizenship. We argue that for as long as the new South Africa continues to have remnants of the old, where Black people were marginalised and systematically dispossessed of not only their land and economy, but their very humanity too, they can never truly feel like they belong, that they are equal citizens in the land of their forefathers. Our historicisation of the exclusion of Black people from the South African project of nation-building is done to demonstrate how the citizenship of Black people in South Africa must be understood in all its nuances, as a simultaneous source of humanisation and dehumanisation.