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 James Baldwin
Although a New Yorker and a Europhile globetrotter, in some sort of exile in and out of America, James Baldwin’s deep love and curiosity for the South—and with it, for the blues—is well documented. At the heart of his literary and ideological aesthetic stirs the blues and Southern speech patterns… Baldwin wrote with the sort of mellifluous beauty that was at once Harlem bred, Southern rooted, and ultimately ethereally global—and thus, ironically, local. Local to where his reader and listener and watcher found themselves at any particular time. We are drawn from anywhere at any moment into any of his works and, by extension, his presence.
