A new book on Zuma’s rape trial has finally hit home
- Shireen Hassim
Two books, a decade apart, get very different public responses. Why?
In 2007, barely a year after the man who went on to become South Africa’s president, Jacob Zuma, was acquitted on a charge of raping a young woman called “Khwezi” (the name given to Fezekile Ntsukela Kuzwayo during her rape trial), gender activist Mmatshilo Motsei published “The Kanga and the Kangaroo Court”. The book was an unsparing account of a society that allowed a prominent man to get away with acts of violence, of a criminal and justice system that was broken for the vast majority of those who were sexually abused, raped and tortured, and of a political system that had lost its compass.
Motsei was eminently qualified to write the book, as a survivor herself and as one of the pathbreaking group of activists who had begun the movement to end violence against women. Few read her book. Those that did were feminist activists and scholars who felt that she had given voice to their concerns, that she had released a collective howl from the gut.
Hardcore Zuma loyalists almost certainly did not read the book. Nevertheless they opened a new battlefront against Motsei, attacking her both publicly and privately.
Ten years later, broadcaster Redi Tlhabi has resurrected the story with her new book “Khwezi: The Remarkable Story of Fezekile Ntsukela Kuzwayo”. This time the public response has been very different. Record-breaking audiences have attended book launches. And radio conversations reveal a rapt public entirely consumed with the injustice done to Khwezi. The book sold out within weeks and is in reprint.
What has changed, many wonder? It is certainly not the story.
The story hasn’t changed
Kuzwayo’s story was first told in excoriating terms in 2006 by feminist academic Pumla Gqola. It was also told by Motsei and numerous academics analysing the violent condition of life for women and queer people in South Africa.
These accounts zeroed in on the shortcomings of the trial that allowed evidence that should not have been permissible, the social norms that denied women sexual desire and that demanded of women compliance with a patriarchal rendering of what constituted a rape-able person – certainly the child Khwezi, raped by at least one man in her community, was deemed to be consenting.
They exposed the almost complete inability of progressive organisations such as the African National Congress (ANC) and its tripartite allies, the South African Communist Party (SACP) and trade union federation Cosatu, to treat women and queer people as right-bearing members. All of these stories have been told, many times.
What’s different this time is that Tlhabi speaks into a South Africa that has changed. The pact of complicity that surrounded Zuma has broken. There are still those who are prepared to die for the “100% Zuluboy” as the T-shirts at the rape trial proclaimed. But they are no longer as powerful.
The tripartite alliance has fractured into innumerable feuding, chair-throwing, accusation-hurling bands of people without an ideological or moral centre. Zuma is now an acceptable target of vitriol. His endless Pyrrhic victories against those seeking to remove him from office have created a vast constituency of critics, not united by ideology, political affiliation or social identity but by a sense that something needs to change. It’s safe to hate o