Redi Tlhabi. Khwezi: The Remarkable Story of Fezekile Ntsukela Kuzwayo. 2017. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball. With the very first sentence in the book, Tlhabi acknowledges upfront, the “legal truth” that Zuma “was acquitted of rape (on 8 May) in 2006”.
Nevertheless, she regards this outcome as “a triumph of law over justice”. Subsequently, Tlhabi sets out in search for a “moral and ethical truth”. In this book, truth does not consist of an idea or even a set of ideas. Rather, the truth is a person and that person is Fezekile (Fezeka) Ntsukela Kuzwayo.
This then is a book whose truth is at once personal and political; in precisely the same sense that Carol Hanisch originally meant it in her immortalised essay of 1969 titled, The Personal is Political. Hanisch called upon women to stop accepting that they have problems that are merely personal whereas their problems derive from and are reflective of, unjust political, social and economic conditions and practices.
“We need to change the objective conditions not adjust to them,” said Hanisch to fellow women. This contention, though not stated in so many words, is the central argument around which Redi Tlhabi builds her passionate narrative.
Fezeka was born in KwaMashu (Durban) on the 17th September 1974 to ANC struggle stalwarts, Judson ‘Diza’ and Beauty Kuzwayo. For 10 years starting in 1963, Judson Kuzwayo was imprisoned on Robben Island with Jacob Zuma, among others.
In 1977 the family was forced into exile in Swaziland where Fezeka Kuzwayo spent part of her childhood. They moved to Lesotho and later to Zimbabwe. In 1985, when Fezeka was 10, her father Judson died in a car accident in Harare.
Tlhabi paints a vivid and ugly picture of life in exile, especially for women and children. She zooms in on the “sexual violence that women and children endured” both in the struggle for and against apartheid.
Tlhabi points out that “the war against apartheid was fought on and across women’s and children’s bodies”. She offers several examples of the abuse and rape of women in ANC camps and of women raped by apartheid police and soldiers.
This, Tlhabi argues, forms the essential background to the incident of 2 November 2005 at the Zuma homestead in Forest Town.
Until her dying days, Kuzwayo continued to allege, that she was raped on that day; the judicial acquittal notwithstanding. While the book is biographical in many ways and places; it would be inaccurate to regard it as a biography.
At best, it can be considered a memoir built around what happened before and after Kuzwayo’s courageous act of 6 December 2005, when she decided to lay charges of rape against the then Deputy President of the ANC, Jacob Zuma.
This audacious act turned Kuzwayo’s life upside down and took her back to exile, literally and figuratively. Crowds of Zuma supporters bayed for her blood outside the courts of the land amid shouts of “burn the bitch”.
Her home was burnt down. Her life was in mortal danger. To deal with the “physical and mental savagery inflicted upon her” Kuzwayo “had to take on a different name’ – Khwezi.
She also had to leave the country and go into exile – again – in 2007. In 2010 she moved to Tanzania and more recently, slipping back into South Africa around 2014, to face fresh rounds of threats and intimidation.
Kuzwayo’s courageous deed of 6 December 2005, also led to the opening up of old wounds buried deep in her.
These included the loss of her father whom she missed dearly and the admission of her sexual history, as evidence in the Zuma rape trial.
The latter was particularly painful and caused Kuzwayo to go back to her painful experiences in the exile of her youth.
As soon as the newspapers reported the laying of rape charges against Zuma, a lot of people, including several ANC aunts and uncles, whom Kuzwayo had known since exile, descended upon her.
Many of these, “turned out to be emissaries sent to persuade her to drop the charges”. For a long time after entering the witness protection programme, Kuzwayo did not have proper legal representation.
Tlhabi suggests that the police who were meant to look after Fezeka at this time may have been both negligent and manipulative.
She argues that in any rape trial, especially one where the alleged perpetrator is someone as powerful as Jacob Zuma, “the victim is as much on trial as the perpetrator”.
Fezekile and her mother were also on trial. Tlhabi takes issue with several aspects of the trial, particularly the admission of Kuzwayo’s sexual history as evidence as well as the line of questioning regarding this.
She sensitively handles the details of Kuzwayo’s sexual history which were paraded in court, including the rapes she suffered when she was 5, 12 and 13.
Tlhabi also deals with the so-called honey-trap conspiracy theory propagated by the likes of Kebby Maphatsoe against Ronnie Kasrils. The allegation was that Kasrils was either responsible or part of those responsible for setting Fezeka up as a trap for Zuma.
For this, Kasrils was awarded R500000 in damages and Maphatsoe was required to apologise publicly.
The genius of Redi Tlhabi’s book is that despite its heavy political agenda, despite the amount of rage in the words, the author deftly woes and abducts the reader seamlessly.
The magnetism of her gripping narrative will melt the hearts of the hardest readers, causing them to respectfully take their place in the messy, imperfect, painful, naïve, grace-filled and all too human world of Fezekile Ntsukela Kuzwayo.
Without realising it, the reader soon becomes the proverbial “fly on the wall”, silently witnessing the deep bonds of love between Fezeka and; her mother Beauty, her late father Diza, her sister Zintle, her niece Nokuzola, as well as her many friends from across the world.
Our society is too patriarchal to lionise rape survivors, especially those with the temerity to point an accusing finger at the powerful.
Despite Redi Tlhabi’s sterling attempt in this book, Fezekile Kuzwayo and millions of rape survivors, who paid and continue to pay a heavy price, are not about to be canonised.
Kuzwayo is unlikely to receive the National Order of Mendi for bravery any time soon. However, we can only ignore the truths which Kuzwayo personifies at our own peril.
Her own body was the terrain on which corrupt and destructive male power was performed. She personifies the rampant gender injustice that reigned supreme.
Kuzwayo is like “a scathing rebuke of the nation, a damning reminder of its complicity in her trauma and forced exile”.
Tlhabi and Kuzwayo had planned a “triumphal book launch” at which Kuzwayo would have repudiated her pseudonym, “showed her face to the world, told her story and reclaimed her name”.
But death had other plans. It its own way, this excellent book almost accomplishes all of the above, on her behalf.