Jacob Zuma’s legal team has continued to produce witnesses associated with the church in support of their belief that his rape accuser has a history of making false rape claims.
They brought the man she suspected was responsible for her mystery pregnancy while studying to be a pastor to the Johannesburg High Court on Tuesday.
At the beginning of the trial the woman surprised the court by describing the pregnancy and subsequent abortion in 1995, the year she started studying in Vereeniging.
She said she used to have blackouts, and she and her mother suspected that the boarding master of the college had raped her during one of these episodes.
Her mother also told her the aborted foetus ”resembled” the boarding master, whose name she could not remember.
Katlehong African Methodist Episcopal church pastor Oupa Matlhabe said he was shocked and humiliated by the suggestion that he may have raped her.
”If she became pregnant, it wouldn’t be as a result of alleged rape by myself, somebody else would be responsible,” Matlhabe told the court.
He first heard of this allegation ”on March 9 this year at 6.45pm” when a fellow pastor pointed out newspaper reports on the pregnancy.
”He said ‘here is the [news]paper, you were the boarding master at our school during that year … ‘ I was shocked because up to this day I haven’t raped anyone.”
He went to the college to seek information on her and discovered she had arrived in February 1995 and left before the Easter holidays that year because she was ill.
Matlhabe said on one occasion that year he heard she had collapsed. The other students had been unable to take care of her because of classes.
He contacted Peete Mbambo, her local pastor, and asked him to tell her mother to collect her.
The woman slept at his house for a night, and she and her mother the next, and they left on the third day.
”I was never in her presence when she fainted or collapsed. It is quite a surprise. How on earth can a person who has fainted know she has been raped, by whom?”
Zuma’s defence counsel Jerome Brauns told Matlhabe that the suspicion he could have been responsible was fortified by the belief that the foetus looked like him.
”It’s not that I am laughing, I’m not laughing, I pity the poor complainant. She is not well, she is sick and she needs urgent attention otherwise many families will be destroyed,” Matlhabe said.
He continued: ”If the foetus was like myself or similar to me, I take it that she and her mother had the right to have DNA testing conducted and from there, then they would have to lodge a complaint with police.”
He speculated she became pregnant by someone else and was afraid to tell her mother, or that her mother did not like the person who impregnated her daughter and they decided to abort.
Matlhabe said a single, unmarried student who fell pregnant or impregnated someone would automatically be expelled from the college.
He referred to Pastor Sithembile Masoka’s evidence on Monday of his expulsion following an allegation of attempted rape made against him by the woman.
Masoka had been expelled not for that, but for being in a women’s dormitory, which was against the rules. He was expelled as an example to the rest of the college, Matlhabe testified.
He said Masoka had been expelled before, but did not reveal why. This week, Zuma’s defence produced a number of people who told of the woman making rape allegations against themselves or others.
The woman has denied accusing any of these people of rape. Sandile Sithole testified on Tuesday he was the target of one of these claims while he and the woman were church youth workers in Durban around 1993.
He saw her as a role model as one of the first female candidate pastors.
Sithole (38) was surprised she could not remember him. A meeting was supposed to be held to investigate the claim, but the complainant and her mother did not arrive, so it did not take place.
He asked Mbambo what to do. He was advised to ”go to sleep” and to ”stay away from her”.
Sithole had seen her several times since then, but they never discussed the allegation as he considered it ”bygones”.
”It was forgotten … I am a Christian.”
Three witnesses said on Tuesday they had not asked Zuma for an urgent meeting on the night of the alleged rape.
Last month the woman testified that while she was talking to Zuma in his study he received a phone call and told her afterwards he would have to attend an urgent meeting as his home later that night.
Zuma has denied receiving such a call. Manazi Majola testified on Tuesday that she phoned Zuma at 10.04pm on November 2 last year. The call lasted 31 seconds.
She was in Durban when she made the call and asked Zuma to phone her back as she did not have enough airtime. She had phoned because she needed Zuma’s help.
Nosizwe Vuso phoned Zuma at 10.02pm. The call lasted about a minute. She had phoned from Durban to tell Zuma she had an overseas job offer.
Zuma’s attorney Julekha Mohammed also denied asking him for an urgent meeting in her 52-second telephone call at 10.08pm.
Zuma’s other counsel, Kemp J Kemp, told Judge Willem van der Merwe the defence expected to complete its case by Tuesday or Wednesday next week.
The 31-year-old HIV-positive complainant alleges that the former deputy president raped her at his Johannesburg home. Zuma claims they had consensual sex.
The trial continues. – Sapa