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Using culture as a fig leaf

[ Posted On: 2006-04-23 ]

Sunday April 23, 2006 - For weeks, fathers and mothers in South Africa switched their televisions off, did not buy newspapers in sight of their young children, or mumbled into their dinner when the news came on.

You’ll recall that South Africa’s former Deputy President, Jacob Zuma, was in the dock, accused of raping a relatively youthful family friend. The events of the fateful night were not in question in the case, as both admitted ‘knowing’ each other. The whole case in court turned on whether that ‘knowledge’ was consensual or not. The South African Press has revelled in the x-rated details in all their lurid glory.

Zuma, though relatively unschooled, is not an entirely stupid man. What he opted to do, once put on the stand, was to take off his suit of Western modernity and don the metaphoric cloak of a Zulu man. His defence, ingenuous if there ever was one, was that, in Zulu culture, it was totally disrespectful to the culture to start out on the road to carnal knowledge, and not complete the journey. According to him, that would be so terrible, that the woman would have no choice but to institute rape proceedings against him. To put the cherry on his legal case, he chose to speak from the dock in isiZulu, and have a translator struggle with the exact English translation of isibhaya sika bab’wakhe (her father’s homestead — a reference to — ummm… his accuser’s nether regions).

Forget the fact that Zuma’s defence is reminiscent of schoolboy myths passed on in furtive whispers or uninformed boasts. For some reason, it has seemed to work with his die-hard followers.

Zuma, despite wading deeper and deeper into a moral and health minefield (he claims that his shower after the act protected him from Aids, despite the fact that his accuser is HIV positive, and Zuma was for a long time South Africa’s chief anti-Aids campaigner), has had thousands of supporters throughout the trial, and one of the more prominent T-shirts worn outside the Johannesburg High Court proclaimed their wearers as "100 per cent Zuluboy".

So this is what African culture, customs and traditions have come to. An ever-convenient coat of armour to be donned when decency, morality and political reality threaten the unwary, or the stupid.

The sheer misogyny of the Zuma defence is just one more notch in the belts of those who have subverted African customs to their own nefarious ends. Because of its truncated past, the legacy of our proud traditions is up for grabs to whoever is greedy enough to claim it. Thus the numbing regularity with which our leaders, both political and otherwise, are revealed to have multiple families, and whose excuse usually is that they are "following tradition" because they paid dowry on the second or third wife. This conveniently sidesteps the fact that they married the first in church, dressed all in white, and it is illegal to then engage in bigamy or polygamy.

Culture is also the coin of the realm in the search for political capital. Recall the furore a few weeks ago when Mijikenda elders engaged in an unseemly tug-of-war over who had the right to impose eldership on Najib Balala. I have no idea whether Balala deserved his ‘honour’ or not, but such rituals are steadily being of any significance.

Any leader, as long as they are loud enough, can claim to be the embodiment of their tribe, and receive the cloak of eldership. Partly, this is because there has been a lull in the past few years in the indecorous shouting match over who had the right to arrogate himself the tag of tribal ‘spokesman’. There is seemingly no contradiction in being a representative of a cosmopolitan constituency, yet spend untold resources in running back to be embraced in the tribal cocoon.

So pity the culture, and the ancestors who must be wondering why we have perverted the gift of tradition passed down to us.

Article Source: http://www.afroarticles.com/article-dashboard

About The Author:

Wallace Kantai is a consultant and researcher based in Washington DC. Contact him at feedback[at]Kantai.co.ke | More on Jacob Zuma: www.clubafrika.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=4969

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