Court+of+horrors,+Jeremy+Gordin,+Saturday+Star



=Court of horrors=


 * //A fragile being's life was laid bare for all to see//**

Saturday Star, Johannesburg, March 11, 2006

 * By Jeremy Gordin**

Unlike William Shakespeare's Macbeth, I have not yet "supped full with horrors".

But there have been times - having been a journalist for 30 years, living in Vietnam, serving in 1976/77 as a conscript in the defence force, ghost-writing Eugene de Kock's autobiography - when I have sat at the same table of horror as the fictional Scots warlord.

Yet I cannot remember encountering a scene as deeply sad - and bizarre and even scary - as the one that played out in court 4E of the Johannesburg High Court on Thursday.

That was the day when Kemp J Kemp SC, Jacob Zuma's lead counsel, cross-examined the self-confessed HIV-positive, 31-year-old-woman who has accused the former deputy president of raping her on November 2/3 at his home in Forest Town, Johannesburg.

On Monday, the woman had already told her version of how Zuma allegedly raped her. This was itself, by any measure, a harrowing story. But on Thursday, Kemp questioned and requestioned the woman about her previous sexual history.

Using a copy of "memoirs" that the woman has written, as well as a number of affidavits from a number of men and women, Kemp set out to show that the woman has a history of being raped in the past. Or rather - as Kemp would put it - a history of having alleged that she had been raped.

The court fell silent as she told how she was raped for the first time at the age of 5. She had, a few minutes before that, said she considered herself a lesbian, although she had had sex with men. She then told the court she had been raped three times as a child, at the ages of 5, 13 and 14.

The man who allegedly raped her at the age of 13 was called Godfrey and lived in her parents' house when her family was in exile in Lusaka, Zambia, and to whom she snuggled up because she was frightened of sleeping alone. Another man allegedly kidnapped her and took her to a house for sex. But, seeing that she was menstruating, he stopped.

Returning to South Africa in the 1990s, she decided to enter the priesthood. While studying at a seminary, she discovered she was pregnant. But, she told the court, it was not her then boyfriend who was responsible - because they did not have sex. It had been the boarding school master who had done it, apparently while she was in a faint as a result of certain "attacks".

It had to be the master who had impregnated her because, when she terminated the pregnancy at five months, her mother had told her that the foetus looked like him.

The woman denied, however, accusing a Namibian student called Goeieman, who has since died, of rape. The court was told that the student was expelled for this allegation.

It is not for me or you - it is for Judge Willem van der Merwe only - to decide which parts of the complainant's sexual history were true, or whether Kemp succeeded in his attempt to demonstrate that the woman had a clear history of shouting "rape" at almost every opportunity.

What is more important is that here was a person who had been stripped of every bit of privacy - while outside the court, in a scene eerily reminiscent of medieval pogroms against so-called witches, she had been burnt in effigy by a crowd screaming "Burn the bitch".

Whether or not the details she gave about her sexual history were true or not, or accurate in terms of the slant she was putting on them, those in court heard about a childhood that one way or another was a sordid story of sexual abuse - or, at best, a series of dangerous and lonely sexual escapades.

We also heard a version of life that set poison at the heart of the struggle in exile, a time that is treasured by many people. And we heard alleged details about a female student's life in a seminary and at a church vigil that are not what we expect from institutions and events connected with the church. This was the depressing part.

And then there was the bizarre feeling that - underlying all of the woman's evidence, hiding under her frequent evasions and defensiveness - we all might be watching an elaborate pantomime.

What the complainant was going through cried out for human compassion. Yet at times, as she recounted a life of horrors, or alleged horrors, it felt as though I were listening not to horror itself but to a strangely disconnected reconstruction of horror.

If that were so, if she had not come to the decision to charge Zuma on her own and we were watching a puppet show, then comes the scary question: Who, what kind of person or people, would have taken the responsibility to put so fragile and wounded a human being in that situation?

851 words
 * From: http://www.thestar.co.za/index.php?fSectionId=131&fArticleId=3150818