South Africa will give track champion Caster Semenya a heroine’s welcome when she comes home this week, a minister said on Sunday, after athletics officials subjected her to a controversial gender test.
Home Affairs Minister Nkosazana-Dlamini Zuma spoke on the telephone on Sunday with the 800m gold medallist whose boyish looks led to the test following her impressive performance at the world championships in Berlin.
”Caster deserves our support as a nation against the onslaught being waged against her,” Dlamini Zuma said in a statement.
”To us Caster is simply the best 800m women’s world champion and must be given a heroine’s welcome upon return to South Africa on Tuesday,” the minister said.
The gender-testing debate has sparked outrage in South Africa, with the African National Congress and its youth and women’s wings saying the test smacked of racism and sexism.
Dlamini Zuma said that despite the doubts expressed about Semenya’s gender, she had done SA proud.
”Accordingly, all of us as South Africans, especially women, must rally around Caster and reject with the contempt it deserves the insinuations being made about her gender.”
African National Congress Youth League spokesperson Floyd Shivambu said the group was organising a massive welcome at the OR Tambo airport on Tuesday.
”We will be going there to welcome her. There are going to be mobs of people at the airport,” he said.
Youth league leader Julius Malema denounced the decision by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) to test Semenya’ gender as ”racist and sexist”.
Malema said Semenya was being tested because she was black and had surpassed her European competitors, according to the Sunday Independent.
Her father, Jacob Semenya, told the newspaper he felt physically sick at the allegations, admitting his daughter had always dressed like a boy and ”if you speak to her on the phone you might mistake her for a man”.
”But I used to change her nappy, and I know she is a woman. What better proof do you need?”
A devastated Semenya nearly boycotted the awards ceremony after she won the 800m race on Wednesday in 1:55,45 seconds — the best time in the world this year — beating her closest competitors by two-and-a-half seconds.
The teenager from a Limpopo village was hesitant to take to the podium.
”She is not rejoicing. She [didn’t] want the medal,” Athletics South Africa president Leonard Chuene said last week.
The furor has sparked debates over often grey areas of gender, chromosomes and hormones, and what makes a woman a woman, in a row that has overshadowed one of the best performances by a South African athlete in recent years.
Semenya underwent tests by an endocrinologist, gynaecologist, psychologist and other experts and the results are expected to take weeks.
The IAAF has stated it is unlikely she will be stripped of her title if she fails the test.
Semenya was one of only two gold medallists for South Africa, the other coming in the men’s 800m event, which was won by 28-year-old Mbulaeni Mulaudzi. – AFP
