In divisive ex-president’s prison sentence, South Africans see a reckoning
Jun 30, 2021
4 minutes
When then-President Nelson Mandela inaugurated South Africa’s highest court in February 1995, he issued a stern warning to its justices.
“People come and go. Customs, fashions, and preferences change. Yet the web of fundamental rights and justice which a nation proclaims must not be broken,” he said at the opening of the Constitutional Court. “It is the task of this court to ensure that the values of freedom and equality which underlie our … constitution are nurtured and protected so that they may endure.”
Twenty-six years later, on a bright winter’s day in Johannesburg, the country watched as
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