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
South Africans and democracy
Only 35% of South African respondents said they preferred democracy and rejected all three types of authoritarianism. To put it in perspective, Afrobarometer provided a list of polled countries. South Africa comes 27th in its public support for democracy, just below Burkina Faso and Liberia. The average support across the 35 countries was 43% (meaning, according to the survey at least, that less than half of the citizens in the countries polled are committed to democracy). Mauritius topped the chart at 74%, followed by Senegal at 66%. In the 2011-13 survey, 42% of South Africans were found to be committed to democracy.
