JAMES HALL, Johannesburg | Friday
A TRIO of Swaziland appeal court judges have sat alternately stonefaced and slack-jawed as a man appealing against an incest conviction explained that the rape of the eldest daughter is required to secure a male heir to the family homestead.
Generations of fathers in Jasper Nxumalo’s family of Hhohho, Swaziland, have found an expedient and, they say, biblically sanctioned way to achieve primogeniture, or obtain a male heir: incest with a daughter.
“I slept with my first-born daughter because it is family custom to do so,” Nxumalo told the Mbabane Court of Appeal this week while seeking to have his conviction overturned for rape and incest.
“My father did the same, my grandfather did it, and my great grandfather did it, too.”
“This is even in the Bible,” he told the court, citing chapter and verse from Genesis and I Corinthians 7:36: “If she pass the flower of her age, and need so require, let him do what he will, he sinneth not.”
The Nxumalo family values succeeded in producing an heir. After being forced to have sex with her father for four years, beginning in 1992 when she was nine years old, Nxumalo’s daughter fell pregnant in 1996, when she was 13, and gave birth to a boy the following year.
Public prosecutor Musa Nsibandze was not permitted to rise from his chair and present the crown’s case. Judge Herbert Shearer told him not to bother as he had heard enough from the defendant to uphold Chief Justice Stanley Sapire’s original conviction. Shearer only regretted the brevity of Nxumalo’s nine-year jail term.
Nxumalo left the court complaining bitterly that his family custom would never have come to light if his estranged wife, now remarried, had not urged his daughter to reveal to police the identity of her child’s father.
At least two previous defendants have used a similar defence when tried for incest, but Swazi anti-abuse groups say there is no evidence that incest was ever tolerated in Swazi society.
A theologian, Jabulani Dlamini, scoffs at the notion that biblical passages given by defendants are justification for incest.