Shireen Hassim. African Studies. Volume 68, Issue 1, April 2009.
Fifteen years ago, South Africans blazed their way into the history books as creators of a new democracy that embraced the best of liberal democratic values. Central among those values was gender equality, entrenched in the Constitution and actively and vocally upheld by the new government. But, in 2006, the deputy president of the African National Congress (ANC), and former deputy president of the country, Jacob Zuma, went on trial for the alleged rape of the daughter of his long-time friend and fellow ANC comrade in exile. Gender politics, since 1994 a symbol of the best and most progressive aspects of South Africa’s transition to democracy, took a nasty turn and exposed instead the underbelly of post-apartheid South Africa. Beneath the heroic facade of the Constitution, it seemed, a vicious cocktail of violence, sexism and hatred brewed.
The trial evoked enormous public mobilisation and was in many ways a theatrical spectacle of dramatic proportions (Ratele 2006; Reddy and Potgieter 2006). Its import, however, was more than theatrical. As Pumla Gqola (2007) eloquently pointed out in her Ruth First Lecture, if the Constitution and Women’s March – both of which celebrated significant anniversaries in 2006 – revealed the best of what South Africans as a collective could be or do, the Zuma trial revealed the worst in South African society. The trial exposed in dramatic fashion the stumbling blocks – social, political and economic – to the fulfilment of the promises of the Constitution, and the social distance that needed to be travelled to meet the political aspirations of this fragile democracy. In this article, I argue that the Zuma rape case was an important reminder of the extent to which gender inequality in South Africa is embedded in class inequality and the historical legacies of apartheid. Yet the article also shows the extent to which misogyny can become detached from such material conditions to float to some extent through race and class differences. The trial held up a mirror to South African society, bringing debates about the intersections between private relationships and gender power into view in the public sphere. It challenged elites, perhaps somewhat smug about the ‘progressive’ nature of the country’s transition to democracy, to address democratisation as not merely encompassing political and economic change but also social change. I argue, as well, that the historical neglect of the possibilities and contours of social change in discussions of the democratic, post-apartheid future reaches into and shapes the present.
The trial occurred against the backdrop of one of the most fractious periods of internal struggle in the history of the ANC over the ideological direction and leadership of the movement. Indeed, the struggles for control of the leadership of the party were illustrated and to some extent played out in the ongoing legal battles of Jacob Zuma. However, this article seeks to explore questions other than political conspiracies and succession battles within the ANC. I am less interested, too, in debating whether the judgement that found Zuma not guilty of rape was legally defensible or just; that is a matter for another research project. Rather, the public debates evoked by the trial are used as a kind of searchlight with which to critically examine the uses and limitations of democratic debate and strategies in South Africa, and to relate these to larger questions about the extent to which democratic culture, and specifically those aspects of democracy that relate to gender equality, is taking root in both the public and private spheres.
Bringing the private into the public: S v Zuma
Although the facts of the case are by now widely known and have generated much debate, they bear restating in order to contextualise my subsequent arguments. Jacob Zuma’s accuser, ‘Khwezi’ (‘star’) claimed that during a visit to his Johannesburg house, he entered the room she was sleeping in, got into her bed and had sex with her without her permission and against her wishes. For his part, Zuma claimed that Khwezi had indicated her willingness by talking to him directly and in a familiar way (she had visited his study earlier in the evening and, in a conversation about her personal life, had said that she was lonely without a partner because of her HIV status) and by sleeping in a kanga (a traditional wrap similar to a sarong) without underwear, and by allowing him to give her a massage. She did not seek to stop him in any way nor did she verbalise her reluctance to engage in sex with him. In general, he said, the fact that she dressed in a short skirt and sat in an immodest way (she did not cross her legs when she sat) led him to believe that she was willing to have sex. In his view, she was bringing the case as part of a political conspiracy against him. The court found that Khwezi was an unreliable witness and found Zuma not guilty.
The trial was a form of public theatre, with qualities of both the carnival and the circus. On the one side of the street, literally, stood Zuma: Zulu traditionalist, polygamist, a senior ANC leader but also a man of little formal education, a person with strong roots in rural KwaZulu Natal. As deputy president of the ANC and of the country, Zuma is a man with great visibility and credibility, and prior to being removed from government office for alleged corruption by President Thabo Mbeki, had headed up the government’s Moral Regeneration Movement and the South African National AIDS Council. On the other side of the street was ‘Khwezi’: bisexual, feminist, HIV positive, activist at the grassroots level, involved in campaigning for treatment for people with HIV, publicly anonymous. Although rooted politically in the same movement and exile circles as Zuma, her experiences were starkly different. As a child in exile, she had been raped and abused. Her complaints to ANC leadership about these abuses had fallen on deaf ears. In the democratic South Africa of 2006, however, a phalanx of women’s organisations were determined to break the silence surrounding rape and sexual assault.
Outside the courthouse, supporters on each side lined up for verbal and at times physical battle that required the police to intervene. On Zuma’s side, supporters were dressed in traditional Zulu clothing and many men carried sticks. There were a large number of vociferous women among them too, some brandishing the provocative invitation ‘Zuma rape me’. Holding up banners saying ‘burn the bitch’ and ‘100% Zuluboy’, and of course ‘Zuma for President’, Zuma’s supporters chanted about political conspiracies and drew attention to the failings of the new democracy: they complained about Mbeki’s economic policies and impoverishment, about the marginalisation and the exclusion of the poor and the perceived arrogance of the new political and economic elite. Zuma joined his supporters outside the court every day, defiantly singing liberation songs including ‘bring me my machine gun’, a song sung to the action of firing an AK-47. The song linked, in crucial ways, the idiom of ethnic politics to the idiom of the national liberation struggle. As Liz Gunner has pointed out, the song was a mode through which claims to the culture and tradition of the ANC were made, in a complex looping of past, present and future (Gunner 2008).
In support of Khwezi, feminist activists mobilised by the newly formed One-in-Nine Campaign dressed in kangas, and protested against the high levels of gender-based violence. The feminist banners highlighted both the new rights women had in the Constitution as well as the failings of the legislature to finalise and pass the Sexual Offences Bill, the weaknesses of the police in investigating incidences of violence and also their complicity in supporting and carrying out violence, and sexism in the judiciary. They upheld the Constitution, and the values of equality, sexual autonomy and dignity that had been hard fought for within the ANC. Behind the political fray, a consortium of researchers, the Tshwaranang Legal Advocacy Centre, the Centre for Applied Legal Studies (CALS) and the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR), led an amicus curiae application to the court, in which they sought leave to present evidence on the social factors and environment in which rape takes place as well as the impact of rape on the psyche of the survivor. The ANC Women’s League issued a statement of ‘regret’ and ‘sadness’ at the rape charge, but was not visible outside the court. Indeed, the silence that followed the League’s initial statement was most likely a product of internal tensions between feminists and party loyalists inside the organisation. Memorably, Pumla Dineo Gqola described the outnumbered feminists in the Women’s League as ‘a handful in a gangrenous sea’ (2007a).
Khwezi did not address her supporters directly and instead every day hurried into court with her head buried under the hood of her jacket, clutching a hot water bottle for comfort. At no point did Zuma stop his supporters from their brutal verbal and at times physical treatment of Khwezi as she entered the courtroom (at one point an object was thrown her way; at another an effigy of Khwezi was burned outside the court) or from yelling abuse and threats at the feminists across the street (Motsei 2007). For the duration of the trial, Khwezi was secluded in a safe house under police protection; following the trial she left the country. Zuma, on the other hand, won a massive victory over Thabo Mbeki at the December 2007 ANC conference in Polokwane. His ascent to the presidency of the party was supported by the ANC Women’s League, and led ultimately to the sacking of Mbeki as president of the country. Most of the new social movements, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the Young Communist League endorsed Zuma as their candidate for the president of the ANC and by extension the country. Even while condemning genderbased violence, those movements were inclined to view the trial as no more than a political conspiracy, thus denying any credibility or agency to ‘Khwezi’. Aside from the ANC Women’s League, which endorsed Zuma’s presidential ambitions, women’s organisations on the other hand have steadfastly opposed Zuma and it would not be an exaggeration to say that it is in a state of despair over its relationship with its allied social movements.
The trial saw the accuser lay claim to the ‘new’ tradition of women’s legal rights and the accused defend himself, albeit in the ‘modern’ court, on the grounds of the ‘old’ tradition of Zulu culture. Yet to see the battle in terms of a binary opposition between ethnic traditionalists and modern feminists would impose a simplistic, if convenient, analysis that evades the thorny questions. To be sure, the differences between the two sides in the court case were stark and they exposed the extent to which the ANC really is a ‘broad church’, one less united by the commitment to liberation than had been supposed. The battles between the two sides also raised the question of whether the ANC leadership would be able to hold together the diverse membership with very different expectations. Yet both sides after all represented constituencies of ANC supporters, and both were united in their assessment of the various inadequacies of the government’s social and economic policies over the previous decade. Both sides used the modern idiom of political struggle. As the trial unfolded, cleavages between the two sides grew wider, exposing complex legacies of past strategic alliances, ideologies and leadership on the broad political left. Indeed, at the heart of the trial was a thoroughly modern debate about the boundaries between public and private spheres.
Gender equality, sexual rights, and political struggle
Perhaps the first point worth making is the obvious one, that gender and gay equality was won through elite suasion (Cock 2003; Hassim 2003). The guarantees of sexual and gender rights in the Constitution were negotiated by leaders of the women’s movement with the male leadership of the ANC, but in several crucial respects represented an elite consensus. They arose out of a commitment to human rights in the ANC, rather than out of a broad public deliberative process. The extent of popular support for extensive equality rights is erratic at best. Two important factors explain this disjuncture, the first relating to the discursive space in which feminism operated and the second to the limits of organisational structures developed within the women’s movement.
Firstly, although the women’s movement had strong grassroots support among women, feminist ideology was not given room to flower in debates about democracy. It was labelled as foreign and western and therefore dismissed, rather than engaged. Even among the socialist left, where the idea of gender equality was at least rhetorically accepted, activists and theorists alike simply ignored gender as an analytical variable, thereby reinscribing the label of irrelevance. This is not to suggest the absence of feminist consciousness and analysis among the rank and file of the movement. There is a rich seam of indigenous feminist thought in South Africa, albeit not one that is readily accessible in theoretical writing (Hassim 2006).
However, the delegitimising of feminism as a discourse until the 1990s made it virtually impossible to advance a broad public debate on issues of sexual equality in which the various voices for equality (and concomitantly the various definitions of equality) were heard and engaged, both sympathetically and critically. Despite the fact that women’s claims to bodily integrity and to freedom from violence came ‘from below’, they were ruled out of bounds for public debate because they were seen to be either divisive within the national liberation movement or as playing into the hands of racists. Instead, debates on equality tended to focus on public manifestations, such as political and economic equality. Even the notions of formal and substantive equality, associated with liberalism and socialism respectively, fail to engage with citizens as embodied political agents (Gouws 2005). For the most part, advocates of substantive equality or transformation, to use the South African jargon, do not address the asymmetries of power in the private sphere, nor do they grasp the multiplicities of ways in which sexual and gender relations and identities are upheld, contested and negotiated by individuals in their personal relationships. At best, the binary distinctions between women as a group and men as a group were taken to be natural, even by many ‘gender activists’, albeit that the groups were to be seen as ‘equal’.
Debates about equality in the anti-apartheid movement were grounded in maternalist and nationalist arguments for women’s increased political participation. These arguments legitimated women’s agency on behalf of others (their husbands, brothers, children, the nation) but rarely accommodated the idea that women were political and sexual agents in their individual right (McClintock 1991; Hassim 2006). The importance of women’s support networks that revolved around the church also acted as a brake on radical discourses of feminism; the hierarchies of age and the ideologies of Christianity limited the possibilities for open discussion of sexual rights. This is evident in debates on abortion, for example. Although in practise women were prepared to terminate pregnancies, abortion could only be included in post-apartheid legislation because it was couched in terms of women’s health needs (Albertyn 1995). It could be argued that many such accommodations with maternalist and other ideologies were necessary in order to achieve practical outcomes (in this case, the passage of a Termination of Pregnancy Act), but it is less frequently acknowledged that these strategies exacted an important cost in terms of changing conservative viewpoints on women’s rights. The absence of an inclusive and public deliberative debate – one that included not just the leadership but also the wide range of voices on the ground – created the dangerous illusion that gender equality was a pet project of the wealthy and the educated. The weakness of contemporary debate reinscribes, in a new context, the idea that women’s rights are an imported ‘western’ trick.
The second aspect is that the women’s movement was not strongly institutionalised. There were of course good reasons for this: political repression during the 1980s, when the women’s movement was regenerating itself after decades of quiescence, made open and widespread formal structures virtually impossible to sustain. The over-riding emphasis on national liberation also had negative consequences for building up sustainable structures. But partly because of its strategy of working within the national liberation movement, the women’s movement did have good links to the political leadership of the left, and was able to parlay its influence to ensure that equality was addressed in the new Constitution. The success of the Women’s National Coalition in the early 1990s, however, also rested on its ability to mobilise autonomously of the ANC alliance. That autonomy was not sustained. Women’s organisations virtually collapsed under the success of their strategies; by the late 1990s most women leaders found themselves in the state or in parastatal organisations and the incubators of their leadership in civil society disintegrated. By the time of the trial in 2006, the ties binding the ANC Women’s League leadership to the ANC powerbrokers were tightened, and the organisation defied feminists to support Jacob Zuma’s bid for presidency.
The weaknesses of the women’s movement and the ANC in building social consensus on equality are even more evident when seen from the perspective of public culture. Caught between party loyalty and its principles, the League maintained a terse silence during the trial. The ANC Women’s League had no strategic impact on public debate nor did it provide political or moral leadership on the various issues that emerged in the trial, leaving the terrain to other organisations and to isolated commentators. Although the violence against women sector was highly active and visible during the trial, its unwavering support of Khwezi, however justified politically, limited its ability to speak about equality and sexuality to any but the already converted.
The past in the present: Apartheid’s social legacies
The ideological spill-overs of the struggle for democracy are not the only aspect of the past that haunt South Africans. Although many of the formal aspects of racism and institutional exclusions of the apartheid system have been eliminated, there has been minimal attention to the legacies of apartheid in the social fabric. The process of systematic brutalisation went far beyond political and economic exclusion; it had far-reaching effects on social and sexual identities. The preoccupations of the scholarship and activism of the 1970s and 1980s on documenting the impact of migrant labour, the bleakness of urban life and the horrors of urban housing (and particularly male hostels) and the destruction of communities through forced removals seem confined in the post-apartheid period to the sidelines of academic debate (Platzky and Walker 1985; Hindson 1988; Moodie 1994). Yet the reach of these debased social institutions and the desperate survivalist strategies they spawned extends dangerously into the present.
One of the consequences of migrant labour for young children was the loss of consistent male role models. Most rural African families did not have a fully present father; many experienced the father as a distant figure who occasionally visited. The most authoritative study of fatherhood, coordinated by Linda Richter and Robert Morrell, points out that apartheid, migrancy and unemployment have resulted in ‘men’s loss of power’ and that these processes ‘have all disempowered men and disabled their capacity to live with and support their families. In response to this, social adaptations have emerged amongst men which further alienate men from children, such as machismo related to the conquest of women’ (Richter 2004:20). Fatherhood has an authoritative and powerful status, but it also acts as a form of disciplinary power. In some respects nationalist organisations have been complicit in exerting this form of power by replicating social hierarchies (although not entirely, as I will suggest below). The association of masculinity with hierarchical control over families was reinforced by African nationalist ideology; it is reflected in the ‘familial’ structure of the ANC (National Executive Committee, Youth League, Women’s League) as well as in the codes of address within the movement (Hassim 2006; McClintock 1991). Older men, for example, are accorded the title of ‘father’ and ‘uncle’, women called ‘mothers’, cohorts refer to each other as ‘buti’ (brother) and ‘sisi’ (sister) and debate is structured according to notions of respect for elders. It is important to note the positive role of such discourses in social movements, of course. These codes of address signal broader social respect, and are part of the bonding process that built loyalty and trust within the national liberation movement. In their emphasis on communal bonds and interconnectedness, they created a sense of nurture, belonging and safety in contexts where political activism was not only dangerous but also removed activists from their families and communities.
Yet these political hierarchies do not exist in a social vacuum. In the Zuma case, the ways in which taken-for-granted hierarchies can be used to silence women became apparent. Khwezi argued that when Zuma went to her bed she did not feel she could refuse his advances as he was her uncle; she could not voice her sense of violation. Instead she lay inert, she said, hoping it would end quickly. In cross-questioning, Zuma agreed that she was passive but he himself saw no problem in her passivity; he saw this as normal. Nor did he see his status as ‘uncle’ as a deterrent and denied that he had ever thought of or referred to her as ‘daughter’. He argued that because she was wearing a kanga, and because earlier in the evening she was sitting ‘like a man’, she was inviting sex.
The issue of seniority and paternal power is a double-edged sword for feminists. Feminists have argued that Zuma should not have had sex with Khwezi because a) she was the daughter of a friend and b) he was in the position of honorary father, or uncle to her (Motsei 2007). These responses are limited, as the notion that the relationship of uncle was ‘sacred’ is used to suggest that Zuma should have exercised restraint. They are also socially conservative, hewing to the notion that large age disparities in sexual relationships are inappropriate. Thus to some extent there is a conservative acceptance of gerontocracy, rather than a questioning of the hierarchies of age. Seniority can be seen as a status of respect but also as one of power. Bibi Bakare-Yusuf points out that ‘the ideology of seniority is very often used as a way of masking other forms of power relationships … The vocabulary of seniority often becomes the very form in which sexual abuse, familial … and symbolic violence is couched’ (2002:5). The abuse of power, she argues, ‘often goes unchallenged by the victim because they are loath to challenge the abuser in the name of “disrespecting their senior”. In these situations what is at work is not seniority but rather another form of power over, disguised as respect for the elder’.
The social hierarchies of gender operate not only between women and men, but also within each of those groups. Thus, it is not only women’s power that is constrained or mitigated by patriarchy, but also that of young men. Indeed, the social and political power of old men was challenged by many economic processes including migrancy, which gave young men economic independence from their elders. As several historians have noted, this shifted power relations between old and young men (Guy 1990; Delius and Glaser 2002). Young men’s power increased as a result of struggles against apartheid, and as the nature of political contestation shifted so did the axis of social power in the townships. In the 1980s, increasingly violent forms of conflict emerged in townships, with young men taking on the role of ‘community protectors’. Debby Bonnin notes that the political activities of the male youths in Mpumalanga township in KwaZulu Natal ‘unsettled the practice of hlonipha and patriarchal gender relations. Many parents, in particular fathers, were indignant that youths should be defining the politics of the household’ (2007:10). The effect of this politics was the emergence of ‘violent masculinities’, in which rituals and expressions of violence were intricately tied to the formation and performance of male identities. The traditions of ANC militarism also reinforced the idea that comrades were ‘tough’. In Mpumalanga township, old people became afraid of young men (Bonnin 2007:14). During the consumer boycotts of the 1980s, old women who bought from targeted stores were forced to drink the oil they had purchased, or walk naked down a street as punishment for their crimes. Politics also forged violent masculinities among white men, as Jacklyn Cock (2005) reminds us; border and township conscription in particular naturalised violence as an expression of manhood among young white men. The legacy of militarism haunts contemporary society and in bizarre ways, unites men across race in ways that Pumla Gqola (2007) suggests place women under siege. In very real ways, then, women’s bodies came to constitute the borders between different groups of men engaged in struggles for power.
More recent research is uncovering the extent to which sexual violence was the dark shadow of political conflict in South Africa. In the most noteworthy of this research, by Debby Bonnin on Mpumalanga township in KwaZulu Natal, we see how rape of women was a distinctive form of violence that was used not only against the political enemy but also within political groups. Bonnin found that rape was ‘a standard practice’ and that both Inkatha and United Democratic Front (UDF) members who protected their movement’s territories ‘expected young women to be sexually available on demand’ (2007:3). Resistance to rape was futile; as one of Bonnin’s informants graphically described it, ‘Who is going to stop [the man] because once you open your mouth you be found six feet underground. Once you open your mouth you close your eyes’ (2007:11). Indeed, survey research confirms that there is a widespread belief among women that silence was the appropriate response to forced sexual encounters. In a study among teenagers by the Medical Research Council (MRC), interviewees noted that even their female peers advised silence. Silence extends not only to situations of abuse, but is also part of a blanket denial of women’s sexual agency. The same teenagers note that expressions of desire or choice on the part of women were inappropriate. Only two teenagers in the sample of 24 said they ever actively wanted to have sex, ‘but emphasised that women were “not allowed” to demonstrate desire and initiate sex, saying that “we have been brought up to think that it is a man’s place” and that they would be regarded as “loose”’(Wood, Maforah and Jewkes 1996:5). This research illustrates that what the judge took to be inexplicable behaviour on the part of Khwezi – not resisting, running away or calling for help – was indeed highly ‘normal’.
Whether political violence is the cause of sexual violence or its effect is an irresolvable question. What is evident is that male identities are forged and played out in violent acts and that hegemonic, violent masculinities limit women’s capabilities and autonomy. Pumla Gqola comments that ‘gender based violence is very ordinary: it is everywhere, commonplace, made to seem normal’ (2007:118). Attempts to categorise masculinity make a distinction between ‘struggle masculinity’, understood as anti-authoritarian and ‘tsotsi masculinity’ which is a from of ‘street masculinity’ that is oppositional and subversive, but also ‘disparaging to women’ (Xaba, cited in Bonnin 2007:14.) But Bonnin notes that the distinction is not helpful as political violence shaped ‘struggle masculinity’ as well. This is an important observation; the spectacle of support for Zuma was characterised by its masculinist struggle imagery that drew on the most violent and antidemocratic aspects of revolution.
Political expressions of masculinity aside, there can be little doubt that violence is a persistent feature of masculinity in South Africa. Research on gender-based violence demonstrates overwhelmingly that sex and love are inextricably bound with violence in South Africa. In 1992, research by the Women’s Health Project estimated that between fifty and sixty per cent of marriages involve physical and sexual violence. In work conducted by the MRC in 1996, among a small sample of adolescent females in the Western Cape, a startling picture of these relationships is painted. The study found ‘pervasive male control over almost every aspect of [the women’s] early sexual experiences, and the male enactment of this in part through violent and coercive practices during sexual encounters’ (Wood, Maforah and Jewkes 1996:1). For women, the violence begins early in their lives. The study found that the first sexual encounters of girls occurred at the early age of around twelve, with male partners being an average five years older. Of the twenty-four teenagers they sampled, twenty-two reported being beaten by their partners on multiple occasions, primarily when the women attempted to refuse sex. Studies with larger samples of interviewees have confirmed these early findings. In a larger study of 1,395 women attending antenatal clinics in Soweto, conducted between 2001 and 2002, MRC researchers found that 55.5 per cent of their informants reported a ‘lifetime history of physical or sexual assault by a male partner’ (Dunkle et al. 2003:2). This finding is corroborated by men’s own accounts of their attitudes and actions towards women. A 1999 study of 1,394 male workers of all races in Cape Town found that over forty per cent of the men reported that they had physically or sexually assaulted their female partners within the previous ten years (Abrahams, Jewkes and Laubsher 1999:1). Chillingly, twenty-five per cent of the men who did not abuse nevertheless said that it was ‘acceptable to hit’ women in certain circumstances (Abrahams, Jewkes and Laubsher 1999:8). The main reasons given by the respondents for why they hit women were their perceptions that their authority was being challenged, or that their partners were not faithful to them.
Although the high rates of violence have a major impact on women’s autonomy and sexual agency, the statistics should not be read to imply that women are in all respects victims at the hands of men. There are various strategies by which women negotiate and circumvent male control. Evidence of transactional sex shows one such set of strategies for survival, as does the path-breaking research by Nthabiseng Motsemme (2006) on how young women fashion their identities in the midst of social and ethical crisis. And throughout the 1980s, women in trade unions, political and community organisations raised the need to address the abuse of women – even though these concerns were dismissed as a distraction from the ‘real’ issues of political liberation.
Nevertheless, these statistics do demonstrate the extent to which violence has become a naturalised part of heterosexual relations. It is not entirely surprising, in this context, that a prominent spokesperson for the ANC Youth League should encourage attacks on supporters of Khwezi. Nor is it unusual for a rape complainant to be treated as the criminal by the community, as Khwezi was, and for Khwezi to be seen as the aggressor rather than the victim of this violent act. A large proportion of domestic violence in South Africa is by no means secretive or ‘behind closed doors’: Bassadien and Hochfeld cite a study that shows that in over sixty per cent of cases of abuse in rural areas, and sixty-three per cent in metropolitan areas, women and their abusers were not alone during the most serious incident of physical abuse (2005:8). Religious leaders from a variety of faiths ‘support domestic violence if they believe the partner was “justified” in using violence and they frequently sanction discourses of “the good wife” by persuading her to tolerate her husband’s violence and to reconcile with him’ (Bassadien and Hochfeld 2005:9). Indeed, in the relatively high number of cases where women disclose abuse to their families (sixty per cent, according to Rasool et al. 2002), abused women were counselled to accept the violence as ‘normal’ or ‘not so bad’ or to avoid ‘bringing down the family name’ (Boonzaier and De la Rey 2003). Clearly, there is a high degree of tolerance of violence against women. The difference in the Khwezi-versus-Zuma case is that views that would previously have been whispered by ‘more progressive’ leaders of the erstwhile national liberation movement were paraded in public, an arena in which feminists might well have assumed that they had made substantial gains. Attempts by feminist legal advocates to bring research showing the pervasiveness of sexist stereotypes and double standards, as well as the kind of data on the phenomenon elaborated above, into the court deliberations were unsuccessful, and the judge demonstrated no awareness of this research in his final judgement – ‘reproduc(ing) and affirm(ing) almost every rape stereotype that women have worried about, and some that we assumed had been dispensed with under our new constitutional dispensation’ (Albertyn and Mills 2006; see also Albertyn et al. 2007).
Indeed, the unfinished process of developing legislation to advance equality created the conditions for the trial to proceed in the way in which it unfolded. The Sexual Offences Bill has already taken close to ten years to draft. Had it been passed into legislation with the provisions that feminist legal activists preferred, the burden of proof would not have been placed on the complainant, as it was with Khwezi. Nor would it have been as easy for the judge to admit evidence of Khwezi’s prior sexual history, her manner of dress or her private diaries.
Khwezi’s perceived lack of power in the private sphere contrasts interestingly with her agency in the public sphere; it would seem that the extension of women’s formal rights has had an enabling effect in the public sphere even though it is limited in the private.
Sexual liberation and agency
Let me return to the point that the notion of liberation was a limited one, encompassing the political and economic spheres but not the social. Of course, even in its limited sense, changing formal inequalities is important and it is one of the great legacies of the national liberation struggle that the gendered nature of the public sphere was recognised. The diffusion effects of removing formal inequalities are also not insignificant and have helped to some extent to shift social attitudes of disrespect for women. The ANC did have modern leadership, especially under OR Tambo, and responded to women’s demands for equality within the organisation and in society more broadly. I would venture that what we are dealing with now is the consequence of failing to address feminist demands around sexuality and gender-based violence; that is, of ruling out any form of explicitly feminist debate that went beyond national liberation. For the most part, the political left did not develop an alternative ‘lifestyle’ politics; questioning about the nature of family and personal relationships were seen as bourgeois concerns. Many of the leadership of the ANC in fact led very traditional, even conservative, social lives. Zuma is not an anomaly in adopting a deeply traditionalist private life while pursuing radical socialist goals in his public life. Arguably, the HIV pandemic has opened questions of sexuality for public debate in ways that might not have happened otherwise. Yet even faced with this major social crisis, it is only in recent years that the link between women’s vulnerability to the HI virus and their lack of power in the private sphere is being acknowledged and addressed at the level of political leadership, let alone among ordinary members of the ANC alliance. In government, of course, there is even less acknowledgement. Mbeki himself has accused feminists who raise the link between masculinism and violence of being racist, of wanting to portray black men as sexually rapacious (and this has made discussions of masculinity very difficult as well). As Helen Moffett (2006) has pointed out, in this context it has been difficult to talk publicly about rape as a form of patriarchal control, as the discussions can easily be derailed into narratives of race and racism.
In a widely cited article, Deborah Posel (2004) argues that post-apartheid South Africa is saturated with ‘sex-talk’. Posel notes the way in which the AIDS epidemic has brought discussions of sexuality into the public realm. Sex has become part of a culture of consumption, and upward mobility is eroticised. Blackness, she argues, has become sexy. Posel captures very eloquently the shift in public representations of sexuality and the body. Yet I think her argument misses important gendered elements of this supposedly more open discourse, and her focus on what might be considered the elite world of the upwardly mobile elides the ways in which ‘eroticised liberation’ is discursively and practically out of the reach of the majority of women. ‘Styling’ of sexuality aside, it remains difficult to talk about sex and women’s sexual agency in the public sphere: ‘good’ women are expected to be ignorant about sex, to be passive and to acquiesce to norms of masculinity that project men’s needs as insatiable. The pathologising of masculinity feeds into conservative notions of sex; for most women it does not enable sexual liberation so much as rule it dangerously a matter of life and death.
The virtuous women citizen of post-apartheid democracy is imagined in the law to be a woman with an asexual, ‘blameless’ past. Indeed, the criteria for rape complainants’ credibility are very high; they must have an impeccably chaste private life, be consistently heterosexual (and preferably in a monogamous relationship of some standing), and have made absolutely no errors of judgement in their previous relationships. In this context, if feminists had been hoping for a classic rape test case, this was not to be one. Khwezi did not conform to the stereotypical (or ‘ideal’) candidate – she did not fit the norm of ‘noble victim’, did not have the kind of unblemished past that would produce a water-tight case. As Albertyn and Mills (2006) have pointed out, ‘The law has historically told judges to approach the evidence of the complainant in a rape trial with caution, based on the stereotype that women (like children) cannot be trusted to tell the truth. And that if a woman “sleeps around” or exercises any degree of sexual agency outside of traditionally acceptable sexual relations, not only is he likely to have slept with the complainant but she is inherently more likely to have “loose” morals and more likely to be a liar’. In the Zuma case, the fact that Khwezi had had many sexual partners previously worked against her; she had apparently been raped thrice as a very young girl (at the ages of five, thirteen and fourteen) while in exile, by ANC members and astonishingly, this was held against her and read as part of her sexual history. The judge allowed her previous history to be admitted but not that of Zuma; her private diaries were also admitted as evidence and her private thoughts (and even, possibly, fantasies) about sex taken to mean that she was not innocent but sexually promiscuous. Her earlier accusation of rape against a pastor was admitted into the evidence and taken by the public and the judge to imply that she was a vexatious litigant who manipulated sex for attention. The pastor was called as witness; in his evidence he claimed ‘she is not well, she is sick and she needs urgent attention otherwise many families will be destroyed’ (Nkosi 2006:3).
The presentation of Khwezi as a sexual agent, albeit one who was mentally ill and, according to the defence, ‘an accomplished liar’, and dangerous to families, alienated many women-on-the-street who were interviewed by newspapers; it was striking how many women said she had ‘asked for it’, and agreed with Zuma that her behaviour on the evening of the alleged rape was at best unwise or unconventional. The very idea of consensual sex – let alone mutually pleasurable sex – between people seemed foreign; rather, Khwezi was seen to have either ‘asked for it’ by her manner of speech and dress, or Zuma was seen as ‘entitled to it’ by virtue of his masculinity. In popular discourse there appeared to be no appreciation of women’s right to desire, to initiate sex or to actively participate in sexual relationships. What appeared to be a prima facie case of sexual abuse to feminist observers (for example, experts in sexual violence noted that the ‘freezing’ reaction was normal and consistent with various studies of women’s responses to abuse) appeared to be peculiar to most citizens. Contrarily, most ‘women in the street’ were sceptical of her claim that she could not actively refuse. They ascribed to her high levels of agency when it came to refusal but not similar levels of agency in relation to participating in the act of sex – she was expected to say ‘no’, but she was not expected to show willingness to have sex through articulating enjoyment. This confounds our understanding of what so-called normal codes of sexual behaviour might be. By way of contrast, neither Zuma’s polygamy nor his sexual preferences for young women were entered into the record (for example at the start of the trial he was in the process of negotiating lobola for his fourth wife, a young woman of nineteen). So although women have extensive citizenship rights, they have to conform impeccably to narrow stereotypes of femininity to claim them. Men, on the other hand, appear in the public sphere with little pressure to conform to notions of virtuous citizenship.
Tradition, law, and democratic culture
The trial of Jacob Zuma provided an unexpected opportunity to discuss the meanings and uses of culture in post-apartheid South Africa. This discussion surfaced in debates about the Constitution but was to some extent unresolved. Here again, the unfinished social aspects of the transition are revealed in the contestation over social values. The Constitution upholds both cultural recognition as well as recognition of women’s rights but leaves the precise working out of these to legislative processes and political debate. In approving the Constitution, the Constitutional Assembly was clear that recognising customary law did not mean a return to the past. Rather, it called for ‘harmonisation’ between customary law and the constitutional value of equality. This recognition is valuable in directing debate away from the binary tension of ‘good’ modern law and ‘bad’ tradition, but it offers few pointers as to where the reform process should focus. Feminist legal advocates have taken on a number of cases in which customary family and inheritance law has been challenged, but the legal challenges have not been accompanied by political contestation in the broader public sphere. The Constitution, in establishing the Commission on Gender Equality (CGE), also establishes an institutional agent that would drive public deliberation on matters of equality; however, the CGE has failed spectacularly to build an inclusive debate on equality. The women’s movement, such as it exists, has neither launched broad public debate nor used the courts effectively to give content to constitutional guarantees for women living under customary law until recently. This is in stark contrast with the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), which has used rights-based litigation very effectively to advance legal challenges as well as open a wide range of issues for deliberation (Friedman and Mottiar 2005). The approach of gender experts has been to deal with the tensions between equality and customary law in a ‘softly-softly’ manner, to point to the reciprocal relations of obligation that characterise many practices that are based on the assumptions of women’s neediness or vulnerability, and thereby to draw on what they called ‘living law’ – space that is seen to be much more flexible and open to women’s claims to equality than customary law (Mbatha et al. 2007). But this strategy has had limited success. It has come as a political shock to activists (although not to lawyers) that courts (especially lower courts) might continue to apply conservative values. The Zuma case has shown up the dangers of relying too much on courts to guarantee equality, and failing to ground practices of citizenship in the normative values of the Constitution.
The case also exposed the politics of representation at the heart of cultural debates, by demonstrating that cultural brokers – those who claim to speak with authority in the name of tradition – can be contested. Although the right of traditional leaders to be the sole representatives of African culture have been challenged in many domains, the Zuma trial reminded feminists that it is not only traditional leaders who claim to be the custodians of culture. Women may collude with male power holders in ways that send mixed signals about the rights of women to exercise public power. The large numbers of women who turned out to support Zuma offered their interpretations of what Khwezi should or should not have said and done. What Zuma claims to represent is itself contested; the case brought to the fore a range of different views on Zulu culture and politics. Zuma gave evidence in formal Zulu despite his fluency in English, a choice seen by many commentators as a discursive weapon that was part of his styling as an authentic Zulu man. The idiom he used was deeply patriarchal, referring for example to Khwezi’s private parts as ‘her father’s kraal’ (Evans 2006). He claimed that as a Zulu man he had no choice but to have sex with Khwezi because she invited it in her dress; that he had been taught that leaving a woman in a state of arousal ‘was the worst thing a man could do’ (Moya 2006:4). In court Zuma said he would be willing to pay lobola to her family as this would be an appropriate way of making amends. He made a statement at a public rally, much later after his acquittal, that as a young Zulu man if he had faced a gay man he would have to strike him down, so repugnant would it be. He got wild applause. As Steven Robins (2008) has demonstrated in an insightful article on the trial, Zuma ‘performed’ African masculinity in ways that re-traditionalised citizenship in post-apartheid South Africa.
The reaction to these statements suggested that Zuma’s portrayal of Zulu culture was far from widely accepted. The ANC Women’s League, and most senior ANC women in parliament and in business, wrote a letter of complaint to the ANC’s National Executive Committee. Most black men who have newspaper columns challenged Zuma’s culturalist arguments. Some older black men argued that Zuma had misinterpreted culture. While Zuma may have received a striking degree of support in rallies, few reasonable men were willing to stand by his statements – indeed, on the issue of homosexuals even the ANC Youth League, not known for its reasonable or progressive views, felt moved to dissociate itself from Zuma’s statement and reiterate its support for the Constitution. Some people sought to discredit Zuma’s interpretations by offering other, ‘more authoritative’ evidence based on different readings of Zulu culture. A significant group of young, black male commentators argued, on the other hand, that culture was constructed and malleable, and that young black people should have the cultural confidence to discard practices that they find offensive or outdated. They criticised Zuma for presenting himself as without volition, as an uncritical conduit of tradition (Ratele 2006; Peacock and Khumalo 2007).
This is an important departure from the ways in which culture has been debated in the past. It is an approach less concerned with arguments ‘from culture’, that advance from the supposed authenticity or not of Zuma’s claims (and indeed his self-serving reading of Zulu culture was easily dismissed by other interpreters including senior Zulu leaders and anthropologists). Rather, it is concerned with placing cultural practices in the realm of deliberation and negotiation. That this challenge comes from black feminists and progressive black men also shifts the question of power away from the obfuscating debate on race, or from the binary women-versus-men approach, something that has bedevilled previous feminist attempts to address the patriarchal aspects of African tradition.
Feminism in the future South Africa
It is apparent that the Zuma trial placed a particular challenge on leadership: the challenge of how to align the politics of equality with the politics of the poor, rather than to categorise it as the politics of the elite. There can be little doubt that there has been a growing rift between women leaders and ‘ordinary’ women. It is perhaps an inevitable rift, given the massive opportunities that have opened up for a small group of women as a result of the government and ruling party’s political and economic affirmative action programmes. The booing of Zuma’s replacement, Phumzile Mlambo Ngcuka, at a Women’s Day rally in KwaZulu Natal in August 2006 was one harbinger of this rift. Feminism in the ANC appears to have become increasingly associated with Mbeki, fuelled by his statements about the next president ideally being a woman. These alignments have become, to some extent, hindrances to attempts to address social and economic inequalities. The equality agenda is being contrasted with a propoor agenda, rather than being allied with it. It is not surprising that so many women supported Zuma; although politically and legally women have been the biggest winners of democratisation, they are also the key shock absorbers of economic failures. The politics of quotas and inclusion into the formal political sphere, while it might have catapulted a few well-placed women into positions of influence and wealth, has not translated into changes in the structural basis of gender inequalities. This is not entirely a failing of women in positions of power, but rather is also, perhaps largely, a consequence of a weak women’s movement that lacks a coherent strategy to address the needs of poor women. The politics of representation depends not only on the ability of women politicians to use their leverage in the state to address the economic needs of women, but also on the ability of women’s organisations to hold politicians accountable for their actions. There is, then, a challenge for the leadership of the women’s movement to re-build relationships with the constituencies of women that it claims to represent.
But there is also a challenge to rebuild relationships horizontally with the leadership of the social movements, who support Zuma as a ‘pro-poor’ candidate. Despite their professed commitment to poor women, the new social movements have revealed themselves as ready to ditch equality rights when ‘more important’ decisions about leadership are debated. Of the major social movements on the left, only the TAC has sided with women’s organisations. Yet it is not the only social movement that has a majority female membership – the same is true of the Anti-Eviction Campaign, the Soweto Electricity Crisis Campaign, and Abahlali ‘Mjondolo. These movements, dependent on women for their grassroots character, seem willing to trade away women’s rights to dignity and autonomy for short-term political gain.
Feminists need to challenge the trade-offs that are being made, and to question again, as the women’s movement did in the 1980s, those who see economic struggles as prior and more important, and as separate from women’s gender struggles. Poverty and inequality are deeply-gendered and inextricable phenomena and to address them as if they were not is misguided to say the least. To reduce feminism to an elite project of inclusion would be to deny the roots of South African feminism in ordinary women’s lives and to ignore the struggles of women in the 1980s in unions and community organisations to make links between economic and social inequalities. Social and political inequality and economic redistribution are part of the same continuum of struggle. It may be that feminism itself needs to be revitalised; that the strategies of inclusion through mechanisms such as quotas have diverted attention away from other important questions of redistribution. The challenge, however, is to conceptualise a new form of democratic politics in which women’s bodies cease to be the terrain over which power struggles are fought.
Jacob Zuma’s successful campaign to displace the Mbeki leadership within the ANC, and his supporters’ purported attempts to return power to the members of the ANC, promised to open the space for such conceptualisation. Yet Zuma’s own statements and actions during the rape trial polarised the public to such a high degree that there was little room for thoughtful and nuanced debate on the historical and cultural constructions of sexual agency and the conditions of sexual consent. Paradoxically, even though the trial brought sexual rights into the kitchen table discussions of most South Africans, the accusations of conspiracies against Zuma, and the unyielding portrayal of Khwezi as victim before her case was even heard made it virtually impossible to debate the meanings and possibilities of democratic culture. Perhaps it was Khwezi herself, the cacophony of the post-trial analysis, who was most insightful. Reflecting on the trial shortly before she exited the public stage, she said:
I haven’t spoken out before because I did not want to be part of the games that I saw being played in the media. I see myself being described and defined by others – the media, the defence, the judge. I have seen the things said by members of the various structures and parties. I see analysis and judgment from all sides. (Odhiambo 2006)