No justice in Zumas rape trial.

last updated 8 January 2015

South Africa

Mavis Makuni

Jacob Zuma got off easy, said Mavis Makuni in Harare’s Financial Gazette. A judge ruled that Zuma, a former South African vice president, was not guilty of raping a family friend—and maybe that’s technically true. But Zuma is certainly guilty of moral, if not criminal, offenses. Before he was fired last year, Zuma was head of the country’s Anti-AIDS and Moral Regeneration Campaign. He was supposed to be “a role model for youth.” Yet, as he admitted during the trial, he saw a young woman “who looked up to him as a father” as a sex object. Her short skirt and bare legs were too provocative to resist. It was “a dictate of his Zulu culture,” he said, “for a man not to ignore a woman in a state of arousal.” So he simply had to have sex with her. Such an attitude is “sickeningly patronizing, chauvinistic, and crude.” And the judge in the case was no better. He allowed prosecutors to “trawl into the accuser’s past to establish her sexual morality.” She was, in effect, on trial just as much as Zuma. And now, while he is acquitted and can re-enter politics, she has gone into exile and will remain in hiding for the rest of her life. No wonder so many African rape victims “conclude that seeking justice is not worth the trouble and humiliation.”