Canada's judiciary system has been praised around the globe as probably the most formidable, impartial and authoritative one. Routinely the UN request that Canadian diplomats and judges serve on international forums (fori) when it comes to investigating and processing atrocities committed around the world. Regardless of who the accused party is, ranging from villains like Libya, Congo, Liberia, former Yugoslavia to the most civil nations, like the US or Canada herself: Canadians are on the forefront to bring perpetrators to justice and to meter out recourse for victims of injustices.
As is the case of Brandon Huntley, a 31-year old white South African, who gave compelling evidence of sustained racist attacks he had endured by blacks in his hometown. The four judges agreed that Mr Huntley deserves refugee status in Canada, and expressed concern that the man would face almost certain death if he returned to South Africa.
The South African government and its extended arm, the xenophobic black ANC which organised the witch hunt against foreigners last year leaving 73 people murdered, did not raise the issue of the court's judgment (well aware that Canada enjoys a higher reputation than itself), but lashed out at "the white boy, who cannot tell us how we rule the country." As if that was the issue...
It is the second time within 2 weeks that a high profile case throws the incessant racism against whites - at home and abroad - into the international limelight: the case of the runner Semenya. As the 'outrage' grew in South Africa last month around the treatment of the black athlete Caster Semenya by the International Association of Athletics Federations, the name of another young black South African woman was repeatedly mentioned: Sarah Baartman.
Ms. Semenya is the masculine-looking 18-year-old runner who won in the 800-meter at the recent World Athletics Championships in Berlin but had her medal withheld subject to sex-verification testing. The fact that Semenya shaved off 6.8 seconds from her previous best just six months ago compounds the urgency to test the runner now. Humiliated, she returned home a hero, with thousands greeting her at the Johannesburg airport, and with leaders ranging from Winnie Mandela to President Jacob Zuma clamouring to defend her.
Baartman was the “Hottentot Venus” of the early 19th century, a singer and dancer of the Khoi people who was born into slavery and brought over to Europe by impressarios who put her on public display because of her unusually large buttocks and genitals. After she died at the age of 25 her body was dissected displayed at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris; her remains were repatriated to South Africa in 2002. Today, she has become an icon in South Africa of the way colonialism dehumanized black people and pathologized black sexuality.
The way Ms Semenya’s humiliation evoked Baartman’s offers fascinating insight into South Africa’s defensive self-image, and how the country projects itself in the world. It tells us much about how, in the shadow of a turbulent past, South Africans aspire toward the diversity, tolerance and dignity laid out in their Constitution — and how distant the lives of many of them are from such aspirations.
Given South Africa’s history, it is perhaps not surprising that much of the political support for Ms. Semenya has been expressed in racial terms: The ANC youth leader Julius Malema labelled the sex testing a “racist attack on a beautiful woman,” and the South African athletics head, Leonard Chuene, asked: “Who are white people to question the makeup of an African girl?” When a newspaper noted that South Africa’s head coach was Ekkard Arbeit, a former coach in East Germany — where women were frequently administered anabolic steroids — Mr. Chuene raged that South Africans would never “allow Europeans to define how our children should look ...”
But if the adulation of Ms. Semenya is partly rooted in jingoism or wounded pride, perhaps it also celebrates something more salutary — a wish by many South Africans to live up to the values of the Constitution’s core statement that “all persons have the same inherent worth and dignity.” Mr. Zuma gave voice to this ideal when he declared that not only had Ms. Semenya “showcased women’s achievement, power and strength,” she had “reminded the world of the importance of the rights to human dignity and privacy.”
These rights have been expressed most forcefully in South Africa’s legalization of same-sex marriage, putting the country streets ahead of its African neighbors and even the United States. In terms of transgender rights, South Africa leads even the Netherlands in its recent passing of a statute allowing people undergoing sex-changes to alter their gender officially without having to show proof of surgery.
But one of the difficulties of South Africa is how far ahead of social attitudes its jurisprudence often is. If same-sex marriage (or the right to abortion) were ever put to a plebiscite, they would be voted down by a landslide.
Mr. Zuma himself alienated many people during his rape trial, and permitted the most misogynistic things to be said about his accuser. How, in a macho culture that accepts such behaviour as normative, does one entrench the values of dignity and privacy that Mr. Zuma himself lauded when he welcomed Ms. Semenya home? And is there more than a little expediency to South Africa’s adulation of the athlete? Even the most repressive societies are happy to adulate people of any orientation so long as they bring home the medal; it is when they actually attempt to live their lives differently that they are subject to abuse.
There was a brutal reminder of this the very week that Ms. Semenya came home: the trial of three men accused of raping and killing Eudy Simelane, once a star of the official national women’s soccer team. Although the prosecution failed to establish any direct link between Ms. Simelane’s homosexuality and the murder, many in South Africa are convinced that she had become the victim of violence against lesbians. According to Phumi Mtetwa, a lesbian interest group’s director, at least 20 women have been killed, in ways similar to Ms. Simelane, over the past five years.
It may yet turn out that Ms. Semenya has been the victim of cruel experimentation, and that her trainers are no better than the impressarios who hocked Baartman around Europe 150 years ago. What the I.A.A.F. did to Caster Semenya last week puts her on a new frontier — and compels us all to ask tough questions about how we understand the old binary oppositions of masculinity and femininity.
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