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 the Oscars
This year’s Oscars were the “Jurassic Park” edition: Hollywood’s dinosaurs have come back full force from their welcome obsolescence and laid waste to their own playground. In 1990, “Driving Miss Daisy,” a film of benighted attitudes toward racial comity, won Best Picture—beating out “Do the Right Thing” even before entering the auditorium, because Spike Lee’s film wasn’t nominated. This year, Lee had a film nominated —“BlacKkKlansman”— and it was beaten out for Best Picture by “Green Book,” a movie that’s at least as backward as “Driving Miss Daisy” regarding the culture and politics of the Jim Crow era, twenty-nine years later.
