A man implicated in an attempted rape by the woman who has accused Jacob Zuma of raping her told the Johannesburg High Court on Tuesday he was surprised she could not remember him.
Sandile Sithole (38) said he was also surprised that the complainant had denied ever making the attempted rape allegation against him.
He said the two met in Durban in the late 1980s when they were both part of youth activities organised by the South African Council of Churches.
He said that around 1993, the complainant visited him at his office where she asked him about his work. Later that day he was told by a member of the council that the complainant told her he had tried to rape her in his office.
Sithole said he laughed as he thought it was a joke.
”It’s something I would never think of,” he said.
He was then advised that a meeting would be held to investigate the allegation and the complainant and her mother would attend it.
However, the meeting never took place because the two women did not arrive.
Sithole asked Reverend Peete Mbambo, who was the complainant’s pastor, what would subsequently happen seeing that the meeting had not taken place.
Sithole said he was ordered to ”go to sleep” and advised to stay away from the complainant.
He was never charged criminally, nor did the church take the matter further, he told the court.
Sithole said ”I wouldn’t know” why the woman had made the attempted rape allegation.
He said he had seen her on a number of occasions since the allegation was made. He thought the last time he ran into her was at a post office in Durban.
There was no animosity from the complainant towards him, he said. He also did not ask her why she had made the rape claim as he had put the incident ”behind my back”.
He was again asked during cross-examination why he did not bring up the attempted rape allegation.
”It was forgotten … I am a Christian.”
He said he initially felt ”very bad” and ”very upset” about the allegation.
Sithole added he last saw the complainant before she had alleged that Zuma had raped her. He said he was approached by Mbambo to testify in the Zuma case.
Mbambo told the court on Monday that he had been accused of rape by Zuma’s rape accuser. The only reason that he could think of for this was that he was putting pressure on her to produce a matric certificate to further her studies.
He had helped her process her application to become a pastor and the following year had found out that she had left the theological college in Vereeniging.
This was when she had fainted in church in Durban and he had sent four church elders to inquire about her illness and why she was back in Durban. The elders returned and told him that she said he had raped her.
He immediately sent for her and when he asked her why she had said this, she refused to answer and said she was leaving his ”dirty church”.
He told her how she could go about setting up a disciplinary hearing into the matter and told her what her rights were within the church, but it came to nothing. He was also never questioned by police on the matter and could not say whether the matter was reported to police.
Mbambo said that in his opinion the only the reason she could have had for this was to cover up the fact that she was unable to produce a matric certificate. This is a requirement of admission to the theological college and he had been pressurising her to produce it, or he would have been accused of negligence.
The 31-year-old HIV-positive complainant alleges that the former deputy president raped her at his Johannesburg home on November 2 last year.
Zuma says they had consensual sex. – Sapa