The Indian novelist Arundhati Roy visited SA in August to promote her 2017 novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. In it, she writes: “From my window seat in a bus on a bright, beautiful day, I saw a mob lynch an old Sikh gentleman. “They pulled off his turban, tore out his beard and necklaced him SA–style with a burning tyre while people stood around baying their encouragement.” Despite her courage in fighting apartheid, the world will never forget Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s, “With our boxes of matches, and our necklaces, we shall liberate this country.” In his eulogy at her funeral in April, President Cyril Ramaphosa used biblical imagery to describe Madikizela-Mandela’s trauma: “Many South Africans have been touching Mam’ Winnie’s wounds. It ought to have been done long ago. “For she wore the gaping wounds of her people. We must also recognise our own wounds as a nation. We must acknowledge that we are a society that is hurting, damaged by our past, numbed by our present and he...
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