Using a mixed quantitative and qualitative analysis of 42 South African textbooks from the postapartheid era, we seek to understand how global human rights discourses manifest in South African textbooks across different subjects and whether these discourses may have changed over time. By employing a two-dimensional framework that examines the vertical flow of human rights knowledge from global to local, as well as the horizontal pedagogical application of this knowledge in textbooks, we offer a novel way of analyzing human rights education (HRE). We find that certain subjects are more likely to contain human rights language: life orientation books exhibit the highest proportion of human rights mentions, followed by social studies books, with history having the lowest proportion of mentions. In our qualitative content analysis of our sample of 16 textbooks, we find that the books generally focus on human rights discourse within a global and national context, using various pedagogical frameworks. As one of the most progressive constitutional democracies in the world, South Africa offers important lessons for transitional countries grappling with HRE and curriculum reform in the context of historical injustices.