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
On Academic Censorship in China
Five years ago, no one on the mainland would have thought that an English academic journal with a small, highly specialised readership would require censoring. Chinese censors usually target large foreign news outlets such as the New York Times, the BBC, the Economist, or the Wall Street Journal, and leave academics in peace. The New York Times is blocked in both its English and Chinese versions by the Great Firewall of China (the world’s most infamous internet censor); the BBC’s main anglophone site comes and goes, depending on what it’s publishing; the Chinese version is fully blocked.
