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We contend that lockdown restrictions to prevent the spread of Covid-19 in South Africa have exposed deep divisions between citizens and the state, due in part to the neglect of citizenship education and to the neglect of our historical citizenship heritage. We propose in this paper two sources of appropriate normative guidelines, rooted in our common, collective history and ethics, which we ought to promote among citizens to reunite our people. We argue that citizenship education ought not only to be promoted actively in schools but that it must be reformed on the basis of two sets of foundational principles: a) Ubuntu; and b) the Freedom Charter. These encourage integration between citizens and subjects, and between citizens and the state; not to impose false universality from above, nor incoherent heteronomy from below, but to regulate these with cultural and historical continuity in transformation.

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A useful way to approach the discourse of rights in African philosophy is in terms of Kwasi Wiredu’s (1996) distinction between cultural particulars and universals. According to Wiredu, cultural particulars are contingent and context-dependent. They fail to hold in all circumstances and for everyone (Wiredu 2005). Cultural universals are transcultural or objective (Wiredu 2005). Examples of cultural particulars include dress styles, religious rituals, social etiquette and so on. One example of a cultural universal is the norm of truth. One may imagine a society with different methods of greeting, dress, and raising children, but one cannot imagine a robust society which rejects the norm of truth as the basis of social practices.

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