South Africa’s transition to a post-apartheid democracy has been widely celebrated as a triumph for global human rights. Yet, less than a generation after the achievement of freedom, the future of human rights and constitutionalism in South Africa is uncertain. This book seeks to explain how and why the apartheid government and the ANC both ‘discovered’ human rights in the mid-1980s. It does so by exploring several rights ‘regimes’ over two centuries: African nationalist, liberal, and republican. Although fragmented and episodic, these traditions help explain why rights discourse and constitutionalism gained broad acceptance in the last decade of the twentieth century, and momentarily aligned South Africa with broader global trends.