Angella Johnson recalls the sex scandals, crimes of passion and conduct unbecoming that fed the lust-hungry public in 1997
What people are most likely to remember among the memorable stories to come out of 1997 (apart from Princess Diana’s death and Winnie roughing up the truth commission) will probably not be the passing of “rob-em-blind” Mobutu Sese Seko; nor even the Virodene “miracle” Aids drug political debacle.
It will be stories about sex — especially the scandalous tales that draw us magnetically into the stuff of other people’s misery.
Thus it was that we delighted in titillating, above-stairs revelations from a Cape Town courtroom that Charles Spencer, Diana’s odious younger brother, had been a serial adulterer and a mean upper-crust cad.
Seems the self-righteous earl, who had lectured the world’s media on the question of morality at his sister’s funeral, behaved like a randy ram at rutting time, bonking an estimated 12 women while his wife was in a clinic for bulimia.
When the carrot-head peer emerged from his divorce hearing, bloodied and bruised by a barrage of negative news reports about his dalliances (not to mention poorer by a settlement of several million pounds), there was not a wet eye in South Africa or Britain.
For in a world that grovels absurdly and sycophantically in the face of celebrities, we have a paradoxical desire to see the famous brought low, dragged to earth with a bang.
Now we just have to wait for the husband of his former mistress and mother-of-two Chantal Collopy to fulfil his threat to sue Spencer for alienation of affections. It is so rare that we hear the side of a spurned man.
Keeping it in the family, Diana had herself occupied acres of print space before her untimely demise as we drooled over grainy pictures of her canoodling with wealthy Muslim playboy Dodi al-Fayed on a sundrenched beach. The amorous images fed our imaginations with speculation about just how far these apparently star-crossed lovers were getting it on.
Numerous other tantalising tales were there to feed our voyeurism, in between more sobering talk of El Ni=F1o’s weather disruptions and Zaire’s descent to near anarchy. But none more salacious and headline hogging than that of the American presidential penis.
Did it or did it not cock at an angle like the leaning Tower of Pisa? Would little Willie have to go on an identity parade in the sexual harassment case being brought by former receptionist Paula Jones? In the end the White House was forced to issue its first ever press release on the state of a president’s organ. Apparently, it’s as straight as the Washington Monument.
We gleefully watched the world’s most powerful man fall from sexual grace and snickered at the embarrassing account Jones gave of a thick-waisted, middle-aged man, his face flushed beet-red, demanding sexual gratification from a young woman he thought was of easy virtue. Oh, if only he had waited for Hillary.
Closer to home, naval commander Brian Power of the SAS Jan Smuts also suffered from a serious case of itchy-fly syndrome, and was hauled before a Durban military court martial after he sought relief with the wife of a junior seaman.
The disgraced officer was brought to book because of distinguishing features which the errant wife could describe on his genitals. He of course admitted to pulling it out but denied putting it in.
But it is when blood and lust combine that sex scandals really produce a most potent cocktail. Take the high society Port Elizabeth m=E9nage =E0 trois that ended with a murder trial. It had all the classic ingredients for adultery, soap-opera style — including hot sex on the bonnet of a BMW following foreplay in a helicopter.
Rumpy-pumpy allegedly ended with rugby administrator Merwe Swart being blasted with a shotgun by hit men hired by Fanie de Lange, the farmer lover of his wife Amor (a name made for the silver screen). Office workers daily crammed into the sexually charged courtroom to gasp at detailed revelations of sexual games and premature ejaculation.
“People like to read about other people’s downfall because we mostly live such drab and boring lives,” explains sexologist Woolf Solomon of the Dr Paul clinic in Johannesburg, when asked why we so delight in such stories. “There are also a lot of repressed sexual desires that need an outlet. It’s rather like watching a live X-rated movie.”
Of course, no annual round-up of sex scandals in South Africa would be complete without at least one crime of passion carried out by a policeman. So we have exhibit one: Senior Superintendent Dave Schwarz, also in Port Elizabeth, who was charged with bludgeoning his wife Sonia (a police captain) to death with an axe.
The apparently obsessively jealous father of two chopped up his beloved after suspecting she was having an affair with another officer. “I worshipped the ground my wife walked on,” he said after being granted bail.
Another chronically jealous husband did not believe his wife when she phoned to say she was working late one night. Thandi Molosioa, a deputy director in the department of public works in Bloemfontein, was dragged out of her boss’s office (with whom she has denied cavorting) by her enraged hubby and slapped around.
It’s also been a year for the oldies to show that love springs eternal. So hot on the heels of Graca and Nelson’s coming out of the closet and cavorting around like teenagers came news of PW Botha and his bokkie. The 81-year-old finger-wagging ex-president is stepping out with Renette Naud=E8, a wealthy widow 31 years his junior. No wonder he doesn’t have time to go before the truth commission.
‘Twas the time for sexworkers to go legal and we had Soweto’s first gay marriage (even the lobola was paid) — a groundbreaking event, considering that !Khoisan X (the man formerly known as Benny Alexander) of the Pan Africanist Congress had once declared that there is no such thing as a black homosexual. Though some might say: “With a face like his, how would he know?”
In a heterosexual huff, Dullah Omar initially said no to a change in the sodomy law, but wimped out in the face of mounting gay pride. And sex on the Internet had parents hurling computers out of homes in case their young ones started to get more pleasure than they did.
On a more serious note, rape was perhaps the big social issue of the year. January opened with a spate of brutal assaults, including the Cape Town attack on political activist Nomboniso Gasa as she slept in a Robben Island guest house; there was also the vicious gang rape of two sisters and two teenage cousins during botched house robberies in Gauteng.
In a bizarre twist, KwaZulu-Natal police were left powerless after a local woman was allegedly raped by three New Zealand rugby players she met in a bar in April. The cops could not prosecute although they believed her story, because it was decided that she would make an “unreliable witness” and the men got off scot-free.
Paedophilia also raised its ugly head with the arrest in France of 200 people — including school teachers, members of the judiciary and a television journalist — linked to child pornography. No wonder there was a public outcry when Britain, in a typically self-serving move, deported self-confessed paedophile Dennis Hundermark to South Africa in February.
March highlighted a series of moving stories about children as young as four being sold for sex, for as little as R7, in seedy hotels in Cape Town and Johannesburg. The police said the child protection unit, faced with 36 000 cases in 1995, was struggling to cope with the extent of the problem.
The justice system had a harder time justifying its failure to protect a seven-year-old Katlehong rape victim, who disappeared after a local man charged with the assault was bailed for R2 000. Her body was found weeks later.
We had the banning, for the first time ever, of a film poster. The erotic British movie Female Perversions offended the sensitive Publications Control Board because of its “blatant suggestions of bondage and lesbianism”, said then chair Braam Coetzee — though he admitted it was”beautiful”.
Con artists moved into the sex industry with a scheme so profitable, a Johannesburg dentist gave up his job to run it full-time. Denise, a 40-year-old divorced advocate, was one of hundreds of women duped by a newspaper advert offering “ladies” a free, upmarket, dating agency.
Unknown to them the suitable candidates, who had paid about R280 for the privilege, were being drawn from another advertisement in Hustler magazine under the heading “Ride a Housewife”.
Perhaps one of the more surprising sex stories was that of a flame-haired East London prostitute (oops! sorry, she prefers=20to be called a “courtesan”) who sued Minister of Safety and Security Sydney Mufamadi after police invaded her private property without a search warrant and caught her buck-naked with an undercover officer; and she won.
To end on a cheery note and prove that it’s not all talk: South Africans can stand erect and proud with the news that they are the third- best lovers in the world, based on quality, quantity and duration, according to an international survey. The United States came tops. Now there’s a title many people won’t mind trying to win.
CAPT: aSexual impositions: The victim of a vicious rape on =0BRobben Island, Nomboniso Gasa (above left); =0B’Slick Willie’ Bill Clinton (above right) and Soweto’s first gay marriage partners, Robert Poswayo and Poly Motene (right)