Judith February On December 5 we marked the seventh anniversary of the late former South African President Nelson Madiba Mandela’s passing, while 10 December marked the 24th anniversary of the final Constitution which was signed into law by him at Sharpeville in 1996. Somehow it seems fitting that these important events are five days apart on the calendar even if separated by 17 years. The adoption of our final Constitution was a significant milestone, though 24 years are not the same as 25 and so 2021 will doubtless be the year where we look at the making of our Constitution and the road we have travelled, more carefully. While the Constitution remains a lodestar to those who believe in the constitutional democracy we wrought, it has now become fashionable to blame Madiba and the Constitution itself for lack of transformation within our society. It is a limited argument that ignores the politics of the day and the corruption and mismanagement that lies at the heart of our inability to ensure basic rights are protected. A more expansive notion of constitutionalism was proffered by former Chief Justice Pius Langa when he said: “Transformation is a permanent ideal, a way of looking at the world that creates a space is in which dialogue and contestation are truly possible, in which new ways of being are constantly explored and created, accepted and rejected and in which change is unpredictable but the idea of change is constant. This is perhaps the ultimate vision of a transformative constitution . . . It envisions a society that will always be open to change and contestation, a society that will always be defined by transformation.” Most democracies find such mature contestation tricky to navigate. South Africa is no different. Given the challenges South Africa faces, it is easy (and perhaps inevitable) to slip into reductionist thinking on the Constitution itself, that it is an imported liberal concept and not worth the paper it is written on. But in a world of cheap populism and easy answers, now more than ever we need to dispel what is reductionist and ahistorical. Former Constitutional Court judge Justice Albie Sachs is a charming storyteller. He talks of his debates on constitutionalism with his old friend, the late Kader Asmal, with humour and relish. Sachs never misses an opportunity to explain the African National Congress (ANC)’s debates on the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. In these confusing times of noisy debate about constitutionalism, his recollections are worth pondering. Sachs describes the pre-1990s rights debates within the ANC as difficult and often fierce. Is the fight for human rights a “luxury” when one is fighting for national liberation from a system as brutal as apartheid? Sachs often recalls how some within the ANC believed that a Bill of Rights would only seek to protect entrenched (white) privilege while not providing the majority of citizens with true protection. During the 2016 #feesmustfall activism, the Constitution itself came under scrutiny. For many younger South Africans, the o