In the story The Cleaner, the schoolboy bully Jaco says to Agnes: “Anyway, you’re just a cleaner. You’re nothing. You’re like the dirt you pick up every day. Who will believe what you tell them?”

People who think like Jaco illustrate clearly why our new Constitution includes Chapter 2 Section 10: Everyone has inherent dignity and the right to have their dignity respected and protected.

Including this human right means the Constitution offers wide-ranging protection for everyone in our country. Here is how a judge explained this in a landmark case in 1995:
“The importance of dignity as a founding value of the new Constitution cannot be overemphasised. Recognising a right to dignity is an acknowledgement of the intrinsic worth of human beings: human beings are entitled to be treated as worthy of respect and concern. This right therefore is the foundation of many of the other rights that are specifically entrenched in chapter 3.”
(Concurring judgment of Justice O’Regan in the South African Constitutional Court decision of S v Makwanyane, 1995.)

Thus, from this acknowledgement of the fundamental right to human dignity, flow many of the other rights in our Constitution. People cannot enjoy equality unless they are all seen as worthy of human dignity – the very opposite of regarding someone as ‘nothing’. And, for example, to live a dignified life you need to have enough food, shelter, access to clean water, health care and protection from harm. You need to be given access to education.

In our apartheid past, black people were systematically treated with great indignity by the ruling whites and denied equality and decent living and working conditions and services. Symbolical of this denial of dignity is the casually degrading way adult male and female black workers were habitually referred to as ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ by their white bosses – even by white children. Jaco in The Cleaner was displaying a very similar arrogant and superior attitude. The Constitution is designed to undo this historical injustice.

Let’s return to the post-apartheid 1995 case quoted above. In her judgment Justice O’Regan brought about the most far-reaching (and controversial) effect of upholding the constitutional right to dignity. A gang of ruthless robbers had attacked a van transporting money and shot dead two policemen and two bank security officials. In the past, they would most certainly have been hanged for this terrible crime. However, one of the robbers appealed the case in the light of the new Constitution. And the Constitutional court agreed: the death penalty is unconstitutional. No matter what they have done, it goes against every person’s rights to life and dignity. It also goes against the prohibition of ‘cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment’ in section 11(2). So today, as a caring country with a fine Constitution we have no executions and rather choose punishment like long term or life imprisonment.

However, in more everyday life, all of us are now constitutionally protected against the type of degradation Jaco and his friends inflicted on Agnes, Tom and Sipho in The Cleaner. Some examples of this can be seen in the ‘Real life examples’ section following.