Quote of the week
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.
"Rainbows and Realities: Justice Johan Froneman in the Explosive Terrain of Linguistic and Cultural Rights" - Constitutional Court Review
The authoritarian national liberation left is locked in a state centric practice. Society must be engineered from above and through the state. The coercive apparatus of the state, its intervention capacity, must be harnessed to bring change to the people. The people are passive recipients of what is deemed in their best interests. The Democratic Left on the other hand is seeking to democratise and embed the state in civil society. It is about building the capacity of the people, particularly the working class and the poor from below, to lead societal change. It is about a relational understanding of the state in which the power of the people determines the power of the state. – Vishwas Satgar
