For Jacob Zuma, charismatic icon of South Africa's liberation struggle, the last year has been a series of shocks: fired as deputy president, ousted as the front-runner to succeed President Thabo Mbeki, indicted on bribery charges and, most recently, put on trial on charges of raping the daughter of a family friend.
Now Zuma has begun to fight back. And it is his critics' turn to be shocked.
Taking the stand for the first time last week in the rape trial, Zuma cast himself as the embodiment of a traditional Zulu male, with all the privileges that patriarchal Zulu traditions bestow on men. He said his accuser, a 31-year-old anti-AIDS advocate, had signaled a desire to have sex with him by wearing a knee-length skirt to his house and sitting with legs crossed, revealing her thigh.
Indeed, he said, he was actually obligated to have sex. His accuser was aroused, he said, and "in the Zulu culture, you cannot just leave a woman if she is ready."
To deny her sex, he said, would have been tantamount to rape.
Such arguments have stirred a storm, not because he insists that his accuser wanted sex but because he has clothed them in what he depicts as African mores about sex and male primacy.
Many experts call it a political Hail Mary, a desperate attempt to salvage the public career of a man accused of corruption and sex crimes. But nobody really knows what emotions lie seething behind South Africa's facade of political unity and equal rights.
Few are totally prepared to write Zuma off.
Revulsion at apartheid's brutality led the nation's founders to write one of the world's most enlightened constitutions, making equal rights a pillar of society.
But public support for that ideal has yet to undergo a test by fire of the sort Zuma could pose, at least in theory.
"I don't think one can simply be blase and say that these appeals don't have any appeal to anyone in this society," said Steven Friedman, a veteran analyst at the Center for Policy Studies in Johannesburg.
That Zuma is making a political appeal as well as a legal one seems indisputable. During this week's trial, he pointedly testified entirely in Zulu, although he speaks fluent English, the usual courtroom language. His remarks had to be translated for the English-speaking prosecutors.
Zuma's claims to a Zulu heritage are authentic. His father, a chief, was a confidante of a Zulu king. Press reports say Zuma has two wives, and he is sometimes reported to be engaged to a Swazi princess. He was also married to South Africa's foreign minister, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma; the two divorced in 1998.
The true story of the encounter between Zuma and the anti-AIDS campaigner last November remains murky.
The woman, who is HIV positive, says she was sleeping overnight in a guest room in Zuma's flat when he came to the room, offered her a massage, then raped her when she declined. She has said that she did not resist because she was too shocked to respond.
Police reports indicate that Zuma initially said the encounter occurred in the guest room. But he has since testified that the woman came to his bedroom, climbed into his bed and asked for a massage, and that he concluded she wanted sex.
Some South Africans are dismayed by Zuma's insistence that his testimony reflects traditional values.
"People do not want this kind of thing," Nomboniso Gasa, a political analyst who spent the 1980s in the ANC underground and later worked on gender-equality issues for the party, stated in an e-mail interview. "They find it repulsive. He has broken every socio-cultural rule."
Yet Gasa said Zuma was likely to retain broad support in parts of South African society, if only because much of the population remains deeply patriarchal.
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