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
During the Constitutional Court interviews… [Chief Justice] Mogoeng was in a pulpit-pummelling mood, spending a chunk of Kollapen’s almost two-hour interview raging against various devils, including the potential for “judicial capture” not with money but through an intellectual co-option. He stridently observed the danger of judges “outsourcing our thinking” and becoming “victims” of unnamed people, institutions and agendas (in the media and the academy… and the shadows, presumably) that apparently stroke the egos of judges to the point where they “do not want to be critical, you want to look like a superstar, when you are not”.
