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It's being billed as the most sensational trial since the end of apartheid. Jacob Zuma, the 64-year-old former deputy president of South Africa, is accused of raping an HIV-positive 31-year-old woman who says she considered him her mentor. Zuma admits there was intercourse, but he says that it was consensual. Among the graphic details captivating the nation: Zuma's claim that he had reduced his chances of infection by taking a shower after his condom-free sex.
Zuma's trial is resonating in South Africa for a host of reasons, mostly related to politics, culture and ethnicity. But it was the shower remark that has become a national joke among pundits and enraged AIDS activists across the nation. Judgment in the case is expected next week, but whatever its outcome, South African doctors fear that Zuma's ill-informed comments could aggravate the ignorance about HIV prevention in the world's most infected country.
Certainly, Zuma, of all people, should have known better. Before his fall from grace, he headed South Africa's National AIDS Council and a moral regeneration campaign that, among other things, promoted single-partner sex. But South Africa's top leaders have long been in denial about the severity of the country's epidemic. President Thabo Mbeki has dialed back both on his suggestion that it was poverty, not HIV, that causes AIDS and his initial reluctance to make antiretrovirals available to uninsured citizens, but his health minister still suggests that AIDS can be treated with a diet that includes a mixture of garlic, lemon peel and olive oil. "Zuma's testimony is the latest in a long line of confusing, inaccurate, pseudoscientific comments by our political leaders," says Nathan Geffen, a spokesman for the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), a group that has fought running court battles with the government over its AIDS policies. "The net effect has been to create confusion and a lack of detailed knowledge of HIV/AIDS, its treatment and prevention among South Africans."
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Dr. Alan Smith, a virologist and AIDS expert at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in the coastal city of Durban, describes Zuma's comments as "sending out a very poor message." Nearly 5 million of South Africa's 45 million people have HIV/AIDS. Among sexually active young women in high-risk areas like Smith's KwaZulu-Natal province, HIV prevalence may be as high as 40 percent. The spread of the virus has been blamed on many factors, mainly unprotected sex but also multiple sexual partners, lack of accurate knowledge about prevention and the abuse of women. (South Africa has the highest per capita rate of rape in the world, with some 50,000 reported annually. Given the significant underreporting of such attacks, the real figure is believed to be much higher.)
On a broader level, the fight to strengthen the voices of South African women has not been helped by Zuma's courtroom statement. During his testimony, Zuma—a Zulu who struggled to get a formal education in rural KwaZulu-Natal before going on to become a hero of the antiapartheid struggle and, later, a popular politician—drew on patriarchal Zulu culture to suggest that his accuser had led him on. He claimed she had been sexually provocative by wearing a skirt instead of her usual pants when she visited him at his home, that she had sent him affectionate text messages and that she had taken the initiative in their encounter last November. "If she had said no, I would have stopped there and got up and left," he said, adding that he was taught as a boy that "leaving a woman in that [sexually aroused] state was the worst thing a man can do."
The treatment meted out to Zuma's accuser is hardly likely to encourage women to report sexual violence. Inside the court, Judge Willem van der Merwe allowed evidence detailing her turbulent psychological and sexual history, including earlier allegations of rape and lesbian affairs. By contrast, the sexual past of Zuma—who has several wives in accordance with Zulu custom—barely merited a mention. Outside the court, Zuma's supporters have vilified the accuser, now in a witness-protection program, shouting insults and burning images of her in defiance of laws barring the identification of rape victims. At one point, local newspapers reported, some teens suggested they were waiting to be raped by the politician as "we want to be Zuma's women." Zuma himself has joined his supporters in singing and dancing outside court, calling for umshini wami , a suggestive Zulu phrase that translates literally as "my machine gun."
These developments have prompted much soul searching among leading South African intellectuals. Prof. Njabulo Ndebele, an author and the vice chancellor of the prestigious University of Cape Town, said he had felt "pain and revulsion" when he saw Zuma calling for umshini wami. "Was he knowingly and defiantly inviting me to make horrible connections between the AK-47 and the invasive penis?" Ndebele, whose first language is Zulu, asked in a commentary published in the national Sunday Times newspaper. "The public morality issues at stake are as graphic as this. That is why, as he sang and danced with his supporters, images of South Africa's raped mothers, sisters, daughters (some, infants), nieces, aunts and grandmothers, raced through my mind, torturing me."
Ndebele urged Zuma to exert greater control over both his supporters and himself. But even a guilty verdict is unlikely to cost him the backing of those who believe that he is being persecuted as a victim of the struggle to find a presidential successor to Mbeki. The battle has divided the ruling African National Congress (ANC) and caused rifts with its Zuma-supporting allies, the ANC Youth League, the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions. "We believe that Jacob Zuma is innocent of rape and that the trial is more political than criminal, based on the way he has been treated by state organs and the media," says Kaiser Mohau, a spokesman for Friends of Jacob Zuma, an alliance that has been fund-raising for his defense.
Most political commentators in South Africa believe that Zuma himself no longer has any chance of stepping into the position once held by Nelson Mandela. But Zuma, who has been stripped of all public positions, remains the deputy president of the ANC and could still play the role of kingmaker in choosing a new leader to succeed Mbeki, who is constitutionally obligated to step down in 2009.
That, however, will depend on events in the coming months. Even if Zuma is acquitted of the rape charge, he faces yet another trial in July—this one on charges of corruption and kickbacks in a notorious multibillion-dollar arms deal. There's also the issue of whether Zuma did in fact escape being infected by his accuser. Zuma says he's HIV-negative; prosecutors have expressed doubts on the basis that no supporting medical evidence was produced in court. Until that question is answered, the jokes about showers are sure to continue—and AIDS educators will find their jobs that much tougher.
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