You do not have to like Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma to condemn the man who wants her raped and killed. Disagree with her loudly, relentlessly, for as long as you like. The moment you reach for rape as your argument, you have lost it, and your humanity with it.
By Themba Khumalo
I do not agree with Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma. I have said so, I will say so again, and I will not soften a syllable of it. However, when a prehistoric rat crawls out of the political sewer and wants her raped and killed, I will stand by her against him.
What the rancid rat has done stinks to the high heavens, and it is vile.
One such primordial rat from the political sewer answers to the name Sello Lemonka Gemba. He opened Facebook and decided that the answer to a woman he disagreed with was this: her violation. Not a speech. Not a march. Not a vote, a pamphlet or a single argument. Just a wish to see a woman raped and killed.
Look at what that is. It is the sound of a mind that has run out of everything. No reasons left, no case to make, no spine to make it with; so he reached into the filth at the bottom of himself and came up holding a woman’s body. A man who responds to disagreement with rape is not angry. He is empty. He is announcing, to anyone who cares to read, that there is nothing in him but an appetite for cruelty.
Now imagine being her. Imagine reading a post in which a stranger wishes rape and murder upon you. Imagine the cold that goes through you. Imagine wondering who else saw it and what they thought. That is what he made, and he made it to feel big. Every ounce of her fear is his work.
Then the post was deleted. Spare us the relief. Deleting it does not wash the filth from the hands that wrote it. You cannot hurl a bucket of sewage into the street and call the street clean because the bucket is back in your hand. The words existed. They were published. They were about rape and murder. The screenshot remains.
It takes no courage to threaten a woman from behind glass. No face. No voice. Nobody across the table to watch what the words do to a human being. Put him in a room with Jacinta and have him read his own post aloud to her face, every word. Let him find out what he is without the screen.
The ANC said what had to be said. It called his words “vile, reprehensible” and wholly alien to its values. It said no disagreement—personal, political, or ideological—can justify a call for rape or murder, and that social media is not a lawless space. It says it is unclear whether he is a member, though he claims on social media to be one, and that if he is, its processes must run.
Jacinta has already opened a case at Durban Central Police Station. Good. Let a court take a long look at him.
This is not selective fury. The same ANC has called March and March’s campaign against illegal immigrants what it is: vigilantism. Fikile Mbalula said in June that people may protest but may not take the law into their own hands. That principle cuts both ways, or it is worth nothing. Intimidation is vile when it hunts the foreigner; a threat of rape is vile when it hunts the firebrand. Anyone who cannot hold both thoughts at once has no business anywhere near a political conversation.
And nobody gets to wave this away as “just politics” in a country that buries its daughters at this rate. We know what rape does. We know the funerals, the mothers, the silence at the kitchen table afterwards. To toss rape into a political quarrel as a flourish is to spit on every family that has lived it. Gemba did not threaten just one woman. He took a national wound and used it as a prop for his own toxic vanity.
So here is where I stand, without apology. I will go on opposing her politics. I will go on challenging March and March wherever their methods and rhetoric deserve it. However, I will not shrug while a woman is offered up as a target for rape and murder. I do not have to like her to refuse to watch her turned into prey.
Disagreement is a right. Savagery is a choice. Gemba made his, and now the law can ask him to answer for it.
What I will not surrender, and nobody must, is humanity. It belongs to all of us, not to some prehistoric rat from the political sewer who thinks rape and murder are substitutes for an argument.