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.
The document is a disgrace. No less disgraceful than its repetition in [advocate Mpofu’s] address. The content of the document plays fast and loose with the facts, draws inferences from inadequate material, and is littered with abuse, invective, and sinister suggestion, purporting to support an allegation that, so it was said ‘the Commission has prejudged the issues before it and is merely going through the motions to reach a predetermined outcome’. The content of the document is directed also at throwing bait before the media aimed at, amongst others, reviving in the media an allegation that a ‘rogue unit’ existed within SARS.
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