‘I wish he was dead’
“KHWEZI” is now 41 years old. It has been more than 10 years since President Jacob Zuma was acquitted of rape and she was eventually granted humanitarian asylum in the Netherlands, but her words spoken in 2007 in an interview with the Dutch newspaper as quoted in The Star, still ring in the memory.
“I wish he was dead. I would like him to no longer exist, to be spared of seeing his face popping up in the newspapers,” she said, stating that she would never reconcile with Zuma who was, at the time of his acquittal, the former deputy president, having been fired by then president Thabo Mbeki after the charges were laid.
She told de Volkskrant: “How on Earth can someone have sex with his daughter? It is too disgusting for words. I considered him to be my father.” – Staff Reporter exponent of women’s rights in this arena in our recent history. She evoked the truth that exists for so many women in South Africa every day. She was insulted, frightened and then hounded out of her life in her own country, just like the teenager in Nquthu and so many other women and girls ostracised and pushed out of their communities all over the country.
When Kasrils announced outside the high court in Pretoria on Tuesday that he would give the R500 000 settlement in his successful defamation case against Deputy Defence Minister Kebby Maphatsoe to a fund for Khwezi, he also pointed to another truth: how, often, the families of women who say they have been raped suffer too. Maphatsoe had publicly claimed that Kasrils had orchestrated the rape charge against Zuma and had sent Khwezi to Zuma.
As crowds jostled for space outside the high court in Johannesburg to support Zuma at his rape trial in May 2006, Khwezi and her supporters were insulted. In fact, she had been so abused that she had been in hiding for three months out of fear, and her mother, who lived in KwaMashu, north of Durban, had been burgled and her home later burnt down.
Given her courage to lay a charge against Zuma, who was then the deputy president, Khwezi remains at the core of that enduring national tragedy.
Certainly Zuma was acquitted, but activists Mara Glennie of the Tears Foundation and Savera Kalideen of the Soul City Institute have applauded Khwezi – and those who have resuscitated her name and courage in the pub- lic’s imagination.
“I applaud those four women at the IEC,” said Glennie, whose organisation has created a network against rape and sexual abuse. “I found the protest was extremely powerful as they stood there unflinching in their silence.
“That silence spoke for many of those, like Khwezi, who’ve felt helpless. But we too, as activists, sometimes feel helpless. Khwezi laid a charge like so many other thousands of women do every year, yet we don’t have a national strategic plan to support them.
“I applaud Kasrils because what he did was extremely positive and, to me as an activist, extremely encouraging, because it said something about how we, as a community, react.
“But we’ve been involved with a coalition of non-profit organisations over the past three years, requesting a national plan for gender-based violence, and the fact that we don’t yet have one is another fall-down in our system, despite our having the best constitution in the world.
“We’ve got a culture where we just don’t hear that word ‘consent’; where we find it acceptable not to wait for consent, and so we can’t even properly galvanise society broadly against rape.”
For Kalideen, who works in the field of education about and resistance to gender-based violence, policy is also a major issue. She agrees with Glennie that a national strategic plan would assist women like Khwezi in their quest for justice.
“For instance, there is the Domestic Violence Act of 1998, which was never costed and has no budget, so in spite of having the policy, we’re still lacking the implementation. There hasn’t been the training… the police, social workers… all the way down. This doesn’t support women.
“There are several government departments that are doing something about violence against women, but we’re not entirely sure whose responsibility it is. The Women’s Ministry? The NPA (National Prosecuting Authority)? The Department of Social Development? The Department of Health? We need a mapping exercise to make sure services are widely spread.
“We don’t have an aroundthe-year campaign because we don’t have a national strategic plan in the same way that HIV does. We need targets and monitoring. This would help fight the cognitive dissonance in society which just creates barriers for women.”
Kalideen cites how rape causes economic distress: “This is what Kasrils did, by donating the money. He showed how women are further hurt in that their families have to carry costs of healthcare and court, which for many people in poverty is prohibitive. Rape victimises women over and over again.”