Source — Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1993 (Interim Constitution), Epilogue
- Title: Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, Act 200 of 1993 (the "Interim Constitution"), Epilogue ("National Unity and Reconciliation")
- Author/Publisher: Parliament of the Republic of South Africa; hosted by the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development
- Publication: justice.gov.za
- Date: adopted 1993; came into force 27 April 1994
- URL: https://www.justice.gov.za/legislation/constitution/history/INTERIM/INTERIM.PDF
- Accessed: 2026-09-02
- Type: primary — a national government's own hosted copy of a constitutional text, directly read (not secondhand). Public-domain government legislative document; not a fence case under this project's copyrighted-book-scan rule.
- Access method note: a first
WebFetchattempt returned HTTP 503; a directcurlwith a browser User-Agent succeeded (HTTP 200, 6-page PDF containing the full ~114-page constitution text). Extracted withpdftotext -layout(poppler-utils, installed this session — not preinstalled, consistent with session 29's prior finding for this same tool).
Extract
The Epilogue, headed "National Unity and Reconciliation," is the unnumbered closing section of the Interim Constitution, immediately following section 251 ("Short title and commencement"). This project's own direct reading of the full paragraph containing the word:
"These can now be addressed on the basis that there is a need for understanding but not for vengeance, a need for reparation but not for retaliation, a need for ubuntu but not for victimisation."
Surrounding context, also directly read:
"This Constitution provides a historic bridge between the past of a deeply divided society characterised by strife, conflict, untold suffering and injustice, and a future founded on the recognition of human rights, democracy and peaceful co-existence and development opportunities for all South Africans, irrespective of colour, race, class, belief or sex. ... The adoption of this Constitution lays the secure foundation for the people of South Africa to transcend the divisions and strife of the past, which generated gross violations of human rights, the transgression of humanitarian principles in violent conflicts and a legacy of hatred, fear, guilt and revenge."
The Epilogue goes on to provide the constitutional basis for the amnesty process that became the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, then closes multilingually: "Nkosi sikelel' iAfrika. ... Morena boloka sechaba sa heso. ... Mudzimu fhatutshedza Afrika. Hosi katekisa Afrika" (Xhosa/Zulu, Sotho, Venda, and Tsonga renderings of "God bless Africa," paired in the PDF with an English and an Afrikaans line).
- A directly documented translator-practice data point, not a stated gap: the Constitution is an English-language legal text, drafted and negotiated in English (with an Afrikaans-language text also authoritative), yet its own drafters chose to leave ubuntu untranslated and italicized inside the English sentence rather than substituting an English equivalent ("humaneness," "compassion," etc.) — the same "keep the loanword, do not paraphrase" choice this project has already documented for hygge's English title (
sources/harpers-nors-hoekstra-2016-hygge.md) and schadenfreude's status as an "unadapted borrowing" (sources/wiktionary-schadenfreude.md), but here inside a country's own founding legal document rather than a work of literary translation. - This is the textual source the Constitutional Court's own judges cite as ubuntu's constitutional basis (see
sources/wikisource-s-v-makwanyane-mokgoro-j.md, paragraph 307: "the notion of ubuntu [is] expressly provided for in the epilogue of the Constitution").
Gaps
- The PDF found is the Department of Justice's own working copy and is not paginated in a way that gives a citable section number for the Epilogue (it is unnumbered, following section 251); this project cites it by heading and quoted text rather than a section number.
- No page-specific date is given for when this particular scanned/typed copy was prepared, only the instrument's own 1993/1994 dates.