On Saturday The Weekender reported on a dispute that has broken out between the journalist and activist, Charlene Smith, and Mark Gevisser, the author of the new biography of Thabo Mbeki. Last week Smith wrote to Gevisser's publishers - Jonathan Ball - complaining that the book had "defamed" her with "gross inaccuracies" and asked for an apology.
In her complaint Smith takes issue with Gevisser's claim, on page 738 of The Dream Deferred, that in mid-2000 she had written "in the Washington Post that rape was ‘endemic' in Africa and had become ‘a prime means of transmitting the disease, to young women, as well as children.'" This is referenced to "Smith C, ‘Their Deaths, His Doubts, My Fears', Washington Post, 4 June 2000"
On page 749 Gevisser refers again to "Charlene Smith's comment that rape was ‘endemic' to African culture." Furthermore, at the launch of the book, held at the University of the Witwatersrand, Gevisser had said, "Careless language by Charlene Smith said rape was endemic in African society." Smith told The Weekender that this all made her "sound like a white, racist bitch."
The paragraph of Smith's Washington Post article on which the entire dispute turns reads:
We won't end this epidemic until we understand the role of tradition and religion - and of a culture in which rape is endemic and has become a prime means of transmitting the disease, to young women, as well as children.
In a statement issued on Friday Gevisser argued that his representation of this paragraph was a valid one, and he failed to see how it "misrepresents Smith's original text." He also stated that "I stand by what I wrote ... and see no grounds for defamation or even misrepresentation, and thus no reason to apologise."
The background to this issue is that on June 19 2000 the leader of the Democratic Party, Tony Leon, wrote to President Thabo Mbeki asking him to reconsider his opposition to providing AZT as a post-exposure prophylaxis for rape victims. In that letter Leon quoted from, and presumably attached, an article Charlene Smith had published in The Citizen on May 11 2000 making the same point.
What probably caused the real offence was a reference in that piece to "chief undertaker Mr. Mbeki." And in his response to Leon on July 1 2000 Mbeki proceeded to go after Smith. He claimed that she was "sufficiently brave, or blinded by racist rage, publicly to make the deeply offensive statement that rape is an endemic feature of African society." In support of this claim he cited that particular paragraph from her Washington Post article. In a follow up letter on July 17 200 Mbeki once again referred to "the gravely insulting statement made by Charlene Smith about rape being ‘endemic' in African culture."
As Smith points out, Gevisser has taken Mbeki's particular representation of her words, and made it his own. Still, one could argue that this dispute is simply one of interpretation - and this paragraph is open to different readings. However, there is a further twist in the tale. The article Charlene Smith submitted to the Washington Post in late May 2000 actually read as follows:
In Africa, even if we develop a vaccine or distribute billions of condoms, and the continent is already awash in latex, unless we begin working on male attitudes toward women - and that requires looking at the role of culture, tradition and religion; we will get nowhere. In doing this there is a need to reflect on how modernisation has warped cultural attitudes.
Writer on African cultural beliefs and African mystic, Credo Mutwa notes that African society is traditionally matriarchal and women are considered to have two souls, one in their head and the other in their womb. He says that the rape of a woman, in cultural terms is seen as an attack on her second soul, her womb soul, and is unforgivable. That is why increasingly, in some communities, because of police inaction, vigilante groups are killing rapists.
Thus, the words which Mbeki used to attack Smith are not to be found in her original text. It seems that they were inserted by the Washington Post sub-editors, as they were cutting her article down. It is also quite evident that Smith was not arguing (or trying to argue) that rape was endemic to African culture - indeed, quite the opposite.
Smith published what she had actually written in a Mail & Guardian article on July 14, and Leon pointed out what had happened in a letter to Mbeki on July 28 2000. So Smith does have a stronger ground for complaint, should she choose to raise it. This is that the words in the offending paragraph were not her own, this is a matter of public record, and Gevisser should have taken this into account when writing his book.
