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
I am tired of being part of a white world that sees itself largely unquestioningly as embodying the norms towards which everyone should aspire. I am tired of being called master. I am tired of the permanent distance between black and white. I am tired that my humanity is barely recognized by so many, who see me as master, as enemy or simply as alien, and that my very existence as a white person in South Africa should contribute to the dehumanisation of so many more. – Pedro Alexis Tabensky, Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Rhodes University, writing in the Cape Times.
