Early in 2016, a racist outburst by a white woman in KwaZulu-Natal, Penny Sparrow, ridiculing Black beachgoers as ‘monkeys’, and announcing that thenceforth she would ‘address the [B]lacks of South Africa as monkeys’, published in her online profile, was quickly disseminated countrywide. It convulsed South Africa in shame and acrid anger. The [Constitutional] Court was not unaffected. Previous members of the Constitutional Court took comfort in reflecting, with evident satisfaction, on the absence of racially loaded and racially defined splits. Dramatically, these now fractured the Court.
Not to follow the West is to fall behind; to copy it is to lose one’s soul. To be a Turk, Pamuk suggests, is to feel always already defeated. – Adam Shatz in a review of Orhan Pamuk’s new novel “The Museum of Innocence” published in the The London Review of Books
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