Quote of the week
Universal adult suffrage on a common voters roll is one of the foundational values of our entire constitutional order. The achievement of the franchise has historically been important both for the acquisition of the rights of full and effective citizenship by all South Africans regardless of race, and for the accomplishment of an all-embracing nationhood. The universality of the franchise is important not only for nationhood and democracy. The vote of each and every citizen is a badge of dignity and of personhood. Quite literally, it says that everybody counts. In a country of great disparities of wealth and power it declares that whoever we are, whether rich or poor, exalted or disgraced, we all belong to the same democratic South African nation; that our destinies are intertwined in a single interactive polity.
August and Another v Electoral Commission and Others (CCT8/99) [1999] ZACC 3
On Beyoncé and Moonlight
D. Scott Miller, author of the “Afrosurreal Manifesto” claims that Afro-Surrealists “transform how [they] see things now, how [they] look at what happened then, and what [they] can expect to see in the future.” They “distort reality for emotional impact” in order to tap into the surreal experiences of reality. Scholar Ytasha Womack deems this bending of time in the Afrosurreal aesthetic as constructing “little difference between the dream world and the waking one.” The atmospheric settings of [the movie] Moonlight and [Beyoncé’s] Lemonade do just that — they make traumatic events of the character’s present experience appear to be visually magical.
