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
Poplak on securitisation
Then there’s the renewed promise to properly “secure state infrastructure”, to deal ever more harshly with those who throw poo at it, and to establish a piece of security apparatus – the Government Security Agency – in order to make sure we fill our prisons with demonstrators and Fallists. Does South Africa need another set of government-issue car guards working for another obscure agency with a bottomless budget for wraparound sunglasses? Probably not.
