Martin van Staden
https://www.martinvanstaden.com
Dr Martin van Staden is the Head of Policy at the Free Market Foundation and Editor of the Race Law Project at the South African Institute of Race Relations. He earned a Doctor of Laws (LL.D.) from the University of Pretoria and is widely published and featured on popular and academic platforms. Van Staden additionally serves as a director of both the Hayek Council for a Free World and the Free Speech Union SA, and as a fellow at both the Consumer Choice Center and Initiative for African Trade and Prosperity. Visit www.martinvanstaden.com for more.
Articles By This Author
Do Afrikaners get to be Afrikaners per se?
The recent controversy over Bokkieweek offers a useful lens on a deeper and recurring question in South African public life: do Afrikaners get to exist as Afrikaners per se, or only as scattered individuals whose cultural preferences must remain private and unorganised?
Thunderous applause for Constitutional Court’s abandoning the Constitution
Section 26 of the Constitution reads identically in 2026 as it did in 1996, and there has been no attempt – much less a successful one – to amend it. Yet, this provision of our so-called “highest law” means something completely different today from what it meant three decades ago. How is this possible? Hint: it’s the vibes.
Democracy and deliberation: Dennis Davis must sleep in the bed he helped make
Dennis Davis has published a second edition of his 1999 book Democracy and Deliberation. In an extract from the new edition, appearing in the Daily
Tobacco Bill progresses, but Parliament has more work to do
The Portfolio Committee on Health on Wednesday adopted a motion of desirability on the Tobacco Products and Electronic Delivery Systems Control Bill. This procedural green
How DA should respond to Ramaphosa’s slow-walking GNU changes
On 17 June, Democratic Alliance (DA) leader Geordin Hill-Lewis wrote to Cyril Ramaphosa requesting a targeted reshuffle of the DA’s representatives in the Government of
Britain calls it quits on parenthood – where to, South Africa?
In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels posed a proposition that scandalised even many of their radical contemporaries: “Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.” Leave it to their intellectual descendants in 2020s Britain – among them “conservatives” – to realise this vision.
A restrained DA does not have what it takes to fix Joburg
Last week in The Common Sense, David Ansara outlined what it would take to arrest Johannesburg’s accelerating collapse.
Bad men doing good: A parable of capitalism’s true genius
Advocates of free-market capitalism often note that this ordering of society does not seek to change imperfect human nature but rather channel it constructively. A short and honest parable about how this might look in the real world, could be illustrative:
South African elite psychosis and the personality of Donald Trump
Much has changed in South African civic discourse since the beginning of 2025, to the point of being jarring to many of us. What could explain the about-face, especially among those who used to portray themselves as the moderate middle?
What’s happening to the FW de Klerk Foundation?
The reformer FW de Klerk left politics having secured for South Africa a constitutional federation and commitment to non-racialism, which the political elite began breaching before the ink on the Constitution was dry. Why, then, has his presidential foundation come out swinging in favour of unitarism and race law?