I Will Not Be Silenced

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I Will Not Be Silenced

KARYN MAUGHAN

Tafelberg

‘Be strong and courageous. Do not fear or be in dread of them, for it is the Lord your God who goes with you.

He will not leave you or forsake you.’

Deuteronomy 31:6

‘Courage, dear heart.’

– CS Lewis

PROLOGUE

I am lying on my side in a single bed, covered in a cold sweat and shaking. There is spit running down the side of my face, and I can’t feel my hands.

My mom is hovering over me, and my dad is pacing up and down in the passage outside my room. His face looks stricken. I try to talk to them, but I can’t get my words out. My head is swimming and confused, a mess of nonsensical thinking and paranoia. I can’t remember how I got here or what has happened to me.

But I also know this state of fearful incoherence very well.

I am a type-one diabetic, diagnosed at the age of four and a half. That’s how I know that the cold sweat sticking to my body, my inability to move and my confusion are all signs that I have just suffered a potentially life-threatening hypoglycaemic coma.

As I start to regain my senses, I see that my pyjama pants have been pulled down on one side.

‘She’s coming out of it,’ I hear my mom say, her voice cracking. ‘Thank you, Jesus.’

‘Mom,’ I moan, before I start to cry, ‘I’m sorry.’

It’s only then that I realise why my pants have been pushed down to expose my thigh. My mother has injected me with a syringe full of a glucose mixture. I must have been unconscious.

My mother’s face is etched with worry, but also deep frustration.

This is not the first time that my blood sugar has plummeted so low that I’ve fallen into a coma. It’s intensely traumatic to the people who witness these episodes and struggle to pull me out of them. Diabetic comas are incredibly dangerous. When blood sugar levels fall dangerously low, oxygen stops flowing to the brain. This can result in brain damage and death.

I am careful about what I eat, I exercise every day and I don’t consume alcohol, but my blood sugar levels often veer dangerously low. And, more and more frequently, I become aggressive when my parents try to get me to ingest a life-saving Coke or Energade that will push my blood sugar up.

During episodes I have no recollection of, I have sworn at the people I love and spat out the energy drinks that can save my life. When I eventually regain consciousness, I have no memory of what I have said or done. And my dad and my mom, both in their late 70s, have been left traumatised and haunted by these experiences they are increasingly fearful are going to kill me.

I am not thinking about that as I start trying to sit up, wrapped in the sweat-stained duvet that is now too wet to keep me warm. I am shivering.

‘I am making you Provitas with cheese, Karyn, and you must eat them,’ my mom tells me before she heads off to the kitchen. My dad tells me to keep drinking the Coke that is next to me on the nightstand.

It is just after one o’clock in the morning. We should all be asleep. How did it come to this? How did I, a middle-aged woman who should have her chronic medical condition well under control by now, get to a place where I am experiencing life-threatening hypoglycaemia at least once or twice a week? I have always struggled with low blood sugar, and walk around with Energade and glucose sweets in my bag. But it has never been this bad before.

And I know why.

It’s the same reason why I am sleeping in a single bed in my parents’ retirement home. It’s the same reason why I am sometimes so paralysed with fear and anxiety that I don’t want to venture outside their home – and, hours after I do, my blood sugar plummets. And it’s the same reason why I have transformed from an outgoing extrovert to an anxiety-ridden introvert who will often go days without engaging with humans in real life.

It’s hard to believe that the sweat-soaked and pale-faced woman lying in a bed in her fear-addled parents’ home is, allegedly, a champion of media freedom.

You’d never know that from looking at me now, with my blonde hair sticking to my clammy forehead and my pyjamas soaked with the sweat of yet another coma. I look like what I am in this exact moment: a person who, after a battle she should never have had to fight, has finally come to the end of herself.

And, while I have clung to the idea that I need to be an unwavering hero to survive the bizarre reality that has subsumed my life since I became the first journalist in South African history to face private prosecution for reporting on a corruption-accused former president, I am starting to realise that I can’t keep trying to maintain that mythology.

It is literally killing me.

CHAPTER 1

Fezeka ‘Khwezi’ Kuzwayo

I am walking along the cordoned-off road outside the Gauteng High Court in Johannesburg. It’s thronged with huge crowds of people and bored-looking police officers, and I can faintly hear singing. I am too far away to make out the words of the song, but I can see that the people exuberantly bellowing it out are swaying and dancing around something. Tightly holding my orange plastic media accreditation card in my hand, I walk closer until I can see what it is.

It’s a battered coffin, adorned with what look like frayed plastic flowers.

It’s early March 2006, and I am a 26-year-old journalist covering one of South Africa’s biggest stories: the state’s rape case against former deputy president Jacob Zuma. I have no idea at the time, but I will spend the next two decades of my life sitting in courtrooms with a man who will become South Africa’s president just over three years later, despite the serious corruption accusations against him. I will witness, again and again, how Zuma and his supporters will viciously target those who seek to hold him accountable for his conduct. And the worst of that targeting will almost always be directed at women.

I feel slightly nauseous when I see the coffin. I know whose end is being celebrated. The people who are singing so fervently around the wooden box with its cheap-looking metal handles are unabashedly shouting the name of the person they want to see inside it: Zuma’s rape accuser, known as ‘Khwezi’. In the weeks and months to follow, they will make their hatred of her clear, again and again, with their shouted slurs, their abusive posters and, in one particularly horrendous incident, a reenactment of a stoning in which a woman role-playing Khwezi is shown being lynched.

When I see the then-31-year-old HIV/Aids activist Fezeka ‘Khwezi’ Kuzwayo, her face obscured by a scarf, walking up the courthouse stairs to take the stand against Zuma, I can hear Zuma’s supporters shouting ‘nondindwa’. It means ‘prostitute’ in isiZulu.

She is surrounded by police bodyguards wearing bulletproof vests and carrying rifles. But she looks incredibly alone.

‘I hope to God she can’t hear what those people are saying,’ I tell Gill Gifford, my colleague at The Star who is covering the Zuma rape trial with me. She looks at me ruefully. ‘We both know she can hear them, Brat,’ she says, using the nickname she gave me shortly after I moved from Cape Town to Johannesburg to work at The Star.

We are looking directly at the comparatively small group of Fezeka’s friends and supporters that has gathered outside the court. They are holding up a large banner with the words ‘1 in 9’ written on it – a reference to the proportion of rape survivors in South Africa who will report their sexual assaults to the police.

‘I know we both want her not to hear them,’ Gill says, looking straight ahead. ‘But I think the fact that she hears them and keeps walking up those stairs anyway . . . That says something far more powerful about who she is.’

Gill calls me Brat because, according to her, I look like one of the now-discontinued Bratz figurines or fashion dolls so loved by little girls in 2006. I frequently dye my hair with strikingly unnatural colours, and I love wearing edgy, punk-inspired clothes, boots and dark eyeliner. At one stage, I’ve even had a vivid pink streak in my then dark hair and a (thankfully short-lived) nose piercing.

I suspect that my relative youth and unconventional appearance was what had made Dave Hazelhurst, then-creative director of The Star and a huge part of it being the newspaper of record in Johannesburg at the time, apprehensive about me being assigned to cover the Zuma rape case. (He would change his mind after reading my copy and soon became one of my most influential mentors.)

I was relatively new to Johannesburg after being hired as the high court reporter at The Star by its editor at the time, Moegsien Williams. I had worked with Moegsien, who would later controversially head up the Gupta family’s New Age newspaper, at the Cape Argus and had enormous respect for him. When he asked me to move to Johannesburg to take up the position, I didn’t hesitate.

It had been at the Cape Argus that my career as a legal journalist had started, almost entirely by accident. The brilliant Estelle Ellis, then the newspaper’s high court reporter, had resigned to move to another publication shortly after I started working there as a general reporter. My bosses were frantically trying to find someone, anyone, to replace her. Eventually, in desperation, they asked me – in my very early twenties and a newly graduated master’s in media studies and journalism student – to cover the high court ‘for a few weeks, until we can find someone else’. A few weeks turned into four years. I loved being a court reporter, largely due to Estelle’s generosity in teaching me how the court worked, showing me how to find stories in court papers and explaining the criminal justice system.

‘If you are not sure of something, just ask,’ she said, ‘and only write your story when you are certain you understand what’s going on.’ Those words would come to define my career as a court and legal reporter. When confused or unclear, I will always seek guidance from people I know understand the subject and can help me to convey it correctly. And, although I have been attacked for writing about the law without having a legal qualification, I believe the fact that I approach the justice system as an outsider is a strength. I write so that ordinary people, like me, will know what is happening inside complex and confusing cases. All I have ever wanted to do is report accurately and clearly on what is happening in the courts and tell the heartbreaking stories of people devastated by serious and violent crime, in a compassionate and empathetic way.

Covering the state’s rape prosecution against Zuma, however, was unlike any previous court reporting experience I could remember. Rather than displaying any embarrassment at being accused of sexually exploiting the much younger daughter of a former comrade, Zuma actively used his rape trial (the only trial in which he ever gave evidence) to promote his own political ambitions.

Significantly, social media was very much in its infancy and, apart from Judge Willem van der Merwe’s acquittal of Zuma, the trial was not broadcast. As a result, reporters like me were part of a handful of people who were able to directly witness and report on Zuma’s rape prosecution without facing the immediate and often coordinated backlash that, in later years, would confront the journalists covering his litigation campaigns (often broadcast live).

I remember frantically writing in a notebook the highlights of what was happening in court and then rushing out to call the duty editor at The Star so he or she could update the afternoon edition of the paper with the latest details of the rape case. I used a weird shorthand that even I struggled to understand sometimes, and I would relay these notes, via my very basic mobile phone, to whoever picked up the office landline. With high-pressure deadlines and no real ability to double-check the accuracy of quotes, reporting on the Zuma rape trial was undoubtedly stressful. But none of the journalists covering the case were targeted in the way I and others would be when we covered Zuma’s subsequent corruption trial and the litigation and inquiries that would come to define his scandal-ridden presidency.

Instead, it soon became apparent that Zuma, his family and his supporters were focusing on what would become their playbook of dishonesty, vilification and harassment of the one person they were desperate to silence: Fezeka. Although she was one of the first visible targets of that often-violent silencing project, she was not the last.

When Fezeka took the stand against Zuma and described how a man she regarded as a father had come into her bedroom late at night and raped her, she was under no illusions about the high price she could pay for speaking up. The weekend before she gave evidence, her KwaZulu-Natal home was reportedly looted by four men. In a separate incident, the security guard assigned to protect the house was forced to strip naked and was beaten.¹ That home was later burnt to the ground.²

‘I know that she was very distraught about all the hate during the trial and the marches and the signs and the protests against her,’ HIV/Aids activist Shaun Mellors told me during a virtual interview. ‘We had to force her not to watch TV and not to read the newspapers because it was just too traumatic for her and for her mother.’

During the rape trial, I had seen Mellors standing outside the court in the purple ‘1 in 9’ T-shirt that identified Fezeka’s small community of friends and supporters. Years later, he told me that he would cover that shirt with his jacket when he walked back to his car, out of fear that he would be attacked. It was not an unreasonable fear, given that rape activists were reportedly threatened and assaulted during the trial.³

After Zuma’s acquittal, Mellors had helped Fezeka and her mother, Beauty, to find sanctuary in Amsterdam, where they lived in a two-room apartment that was permanently covered in the sewing work that Beauty loved to create. Given the constant level of threat they were under, Mellors explained, the only alternative to Fezeka and Beauty fleeing South Africa would have been for them to remain, indefinitely, in the witness protection programme. That was simply not an option, he said. As a result, the pair spent a year living in Amsterdam before moving to Tanzania for eighteen months.

‘I think the only regret that Fezeka expressed to me about laying a rape charge against Zuma was the impact that it had on MaBeauty. But her mother always told her not to regret it,’ Mellors told me. ‘It was just really difficult to take MaBeauty to Amsterdam, although they were happy there. It was a cold place, she didn’t have her church, she didn’t have her friends and she tried to adjust. And then when they moved to Tanzania, it was again uprooting and unsettling for her.’

I remember how unsurprised many of my colleagues were that Fezeka had left South Africa after the former deputy president’s acquittal. Looking back now, I am struck by what a disturbing precursor to Zuma’s ascent to power that was. He and his supporters had demonised a 31-year-old HIV/Aids activist to such a degree that she and her mother were forced to live in protective custody or risk physical harm. As they would do to many other women who sought to hold the soon-to-be president to account, Zuma’s allies and supporters had also tried to undermine Fezeka’s rape accusations by claiming that she was an operative for one of Zuma’s enemies, who had been ‘sent’ to seduce him. During his often invasive cross-examination of Fezeka, Zuma’s advocate, senior counsel Kemp J Kemp, asked her: ‘Would it surprise you if [Zuma’s] first reaction was to say