Former deputy president Jacob Zuma will spend his 64th birthday in the Johannesburg High Court on Wednesday as he defends himself on a charge of rape.
His birth date was revealed when he was sworn in for his testimony last week.
Zuma is accused of raping a 31-year-old HIV-positive family friend at his home in Johannesburg on November 2 last year. He claims they had consensual sex.
The website set up to support him was already filled with birthday wishes this week, with the webmaster telling supporters: ”We will make an effort to convey your birthday messages to him so that even though this is a difficult time for Baba, he will know he is in the thoughts and prayers of so many. Right now, that is the
best birthday present we can give him.”
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. – Sapa