The enduring pain of Khwezi
Jacob Zuma’s rape accuser is back in the public frame after Ronnie Kasrils this week donated his defamation settlement to her, drawing attention to what happens to women who lay rape charges. looks at the issue
ATEENAGE girl is struggling to continue with her life. She has spent the better part of the week at Charles Johnson Memorial Hospital in rural Nquthu, KwaZulu-Natal, having tried to commit suicide by overdosing on sleeping tablets.
She told a daily newspaper this was because her community had been calling her names like “esincane” (little b*tch) and her parents have been saying she is a disgrace to their family.
But the source of all this misery is her 45-year-old teacher at Ekucabangeni Secondary School, also in Nquthu, who is accused of the sexual assault and statutory rape of at least five other schoolgirls aged between 14 and 17.
The teacher recorded the abuse in explicit videos which were distributed widely enough for the Grade 11, who was in hospital this week, to be recognised.
“The video humiliated me and my family in the community,” she told the Sowetan newspaper.
Meanwhile the school’s governing body chairman, Sithembiso Sibisi, said: “I don’t want to lie to you… all those girls have been the laughing stock of the community since the incidents were uncovered.”
It’s shocking that the teacher is still at large after pupils at the school torched the cottage in which the alleged assaults took place. Still, the portfolio committee on basic education this week, while it “noted with grave concern” the allegations, commended the MEC for education in KwaZulu-Natal for “the very progressive action it has taken by laying criminal charges of statutory rape against the alleged perpetrator”.
That is a positive step, but how many times do we hear that the government and political parties are concerned about what happens to women themselves when they lay charges of rape? And there are many such brave women, like President Jacob Zuma’s rape accuser, Khwezi.
Our crime statistics of last September show that sexual offences in our country are about to overtake those of war zones like the Democratic Republic of Congo. There are, on average, 147 sexual offence cases a day, adding up to about 53 000 a year.
This is why Khwezi matters. And this is why the four young women who staged a silent protest in front of Zuma as he stood on the podium at the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) on August 6 upon the municipal election results announcement matter.
Most of all, this is why former cabinet minister Ronnie Kasrils matters, because it is he who this week drew our visceral attention to Khwezi again, and to what can happen to women who charge men with rape.
Khwezi, for all her anonymity, remains the most powerful 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 Joburg 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 public’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 genderbased 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 around-the-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 a central truth about 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.”