S. Africa Divided by Rape Trial

An angry crowd seethed outside Johannesburg’s High Court as people held aloft a woman’s picture and set it alight. She was hustled through a back entrance to a courtroom where she faced days of grueling cross-examination.

It almost seemed that she was the perpetrator of a heinous crime.

But the woman is a rape complainant whose identity is supposed to be secret. And the defendant is a top leader in the ruling African National Congress, former South African Deputy President Jacob Zuma.

“It’s being said that she’s a slut ... that she’s a thief of other women’s husbands, that she did it for money,” said Carrie Shelver of People Opposing Women Abuse.

Shelver said she heard several women supporting Zuma at the court, saying they wished they’d been raped by him.

In a country with the highest rate of reported rapes in the world, the trial has angered women’s rights activists and divided the ANC.

Defense lawyers delved for days into the 31-year-old woman’s sexual history, disclosing that she was a lesbian and that she underwent counseling after several previous alleged rapes, including two when she was a child -- which defense lawyer Kemp J. Kemp suggested were consensual.

Some activists argue that the burning of the woman’s portrait spotlights a disturbing misogyny in South African society, while the trial itself underscores the persistent widespread myths about rape.

In 2004-05, there were 55,114 reported rapes or attempted rapes in South Africa, one every 10 minutes, a 25% increase from 1994-95. But activists here claim that five to nine times more women suffer rape in silence. Only 7% of rape cases end up in conviction.

“I think the rape trial gives a good indication of what rape survivors go through on a daily basis,” said Chantel Cooper, director of Cape Town Rape Crisis Support. “They want to portray her either as telling lies or someone who’s put herself into a vulnerable position: that she’s responsible, at the end of the day, for her rape.

“It comes down to myths and perceptions,” Cooper added. “One of the biggest frustrations that we have is that the public tends to judge the survivors as guilty until proven innocent and the perpetrators as innocent until proven guilty.”

But supporters of Zuma, once considered the likely successor to South Africa’s president, claim that the accuser was paid to frame him and see the case as a political conspiracy to undermine his chances of leading the nation.

Zuma’s lawyers are reportedly so confident of victory that they may soon request that the case be thrown out on the basis that the state could not make its case.

A charismatic populist, Zuma provided a good foil to South African President Thabo Mbeki, who is often depicted as out of touch. Formerly head of the South African National AIDS Council and the Moral Regeneration Movement in South Africa, Zuma admits to having unprotected sex with his HIV-positive accuser at his house in November, but he claims that she consented to it.

As head of the Moral Regeneration Movement, a group involved in combating HIV/AIDS through a return to traditional moral values, Zuma advocated virginity tests for girls.

Analyst Raymond Louw, editor of the analytical journal Southern Africa Report, said that guilty or not, Zuma had broken the rules of both the Moral Regeneration Movement and the AIDS council, damaging his standing among women in the party.

“I think the trial has done him an enormous amount of damage,” Louw said.

The complainant testified that while she was a guest in Zuma’s house, he woke her in the middle of the night, massaged her against her protests, held her arms down and raped her.

She said the 63-year-old politician was a friend of her late father’s whom she had known since she was 5 from the years of ANC exile during the apartheid era.

Defense lawyer Kemp suggested that she should have fought Zuma and should have said “no” repeatedly during sex. She responded that she was scared and that she froze, unable to move or speak.

Kemp argued that Zuma might have thought she was consenting, a view she accepted during his cross-examination.

The trial has highlighted the close relationship between ANC families during their apartheid-era exile. Many members of those families now occupy top positions and do one another favors. Earlier, a judge excused himself from hearing the trial after revealing that his sister had given birth to Zuma’s child.

The complainant said she called both Zuma and Intelligence Minister Ronnie Kasrils “uncle” and phoned them when she needed help or advice.

Evidence in the trial has highlighted a deep split in the ANC, as pro-Zuma party figures allegedly urged the woman to drop her case because it would damage him.

Mbeki fired Zuma as deputy president last year after he was charged on an unrelated corruption matter, which severely damaged his chances of succeeding Mbeki as president. The corruption case is pending.

The complainant in the rape case says an ANC woman told her: “Did I realize what it was going to do to the ANC? That it was going to rip people apart? Could I imagine what this country would be like if Mbeki or Mbeki’s people took over?”

Shelver of People Opposing Women Abuse said: “If you speak out particularly against somebody within the party or somebody who’s considered to have contributed a great deal to the political struggle in the country, then that’s considered to be a betrayal. So a woman’s sexual integrity is less significant than overall political ideals.

“I think there was a lot of sexual violence that happened in [the ANC’s] exile and continues to happen within political parties, and that stuff cannot be spoken about,” Shelver added. “When somebody does break the silence, it’s almost seen to jolt people out of their own denial and make them confront their own experiences, and I think those are very uncomfortable things for people.”

Analyst Judith February of the Institute for Democracy in South Africa, writing in the newspaper Business Day recently, said the trial should not be about politics and whether Zuma would survive politically.

“At its heart it should provide us with the opportunity to challenge and question patriarchy, sexism, violence and the unacceptably high levels of abuse against women and children,” she wrote.

“No matter the legal judgment, the court of public opinion needs to send out a clear message that ‘no’ means ‘no’ and that women have the right and power to refuse consent, no matter what the circumstances.”