Recognising the courage in Sisonke Msimang’s ”My father the ‘sex pest”’ (November 9) demands that we all take what she has to say seriously. I believe Msimang when she says her father was falsely accused of sexually harassing the woman who laid such charges against him. Like her, I value Audre Lorde’s words about the need to speak the truth publicly and deal with the risks.
As an incurable feminist, whose embrace of such politics was also made easy by my mother and father’s progressive parenting choices, I can only imagine the horror the Msimang family has had to endure in recent months. However, as Msimang knows, there aren’t progressive parents behind every feminist intellectual activist: many feminists have misogynist fathers and patriarchal mothers.
I started out by saying that I believe Msimang because I know and admire her work and I am convinced of her resolve and principles. It’s easy to believe her. I have no reservations in this regard. I don’t know her father, except to the extent that prior to the sexual harassment allegations, I knew his name and the positions of leadership he had held in various organisations. I don’t know the woman who laid the charge.
Msimang admits that because she is a feminist, she would have believed the woman under different circumstances. Yes, as women’s rights activists, we know that in exceptional cases women lie about violation. Yet Msimang’s sadness stems from our consistency.
On what basis should we have assumed Mavuso Msimang’s innocence and made that doubt a matter of public record? On the basis of his status as a principled feminist’s father? On the basis that he was contesting the charges? Indeed, why were we to assume automatically even their familial connection? As feminists, we are not generally privy to one another’s full biographical and family details.
Msimang’s sadness and public defence of her father make sense. As my dad’s feminist daughter, I would have done the same had it ever come to that. But our commitment to gender transformation and justice does not require that we first imagine that a woman might be lying. That is the work of patriarchy’s foot soldiers.
Just as I believed Nomangezi Matokazi, Khwezi, Nomawele Njongo and countless others whose names didn’t make it to the papers, I will believe a woman who says she has been violated, especially in a country where violent men are routinely called ”good men”. I believe the woman unless I know better. In the case of Mavuso Msimang, I now know better, but the entire saga could have been in line with the rule, rather than the exception. It is too dangerous for feminists to start second-guessing every woman who claims to have been violated.
Pumla Dineo Gqola is associate professor of literary, cultural and media studies at the School of Literature and Language Studies, University of the Witwatersrand