A Highly Charged Rape Trial Tests South Africa's Ideals

For Jacob G. Zuma, a charismatic figure of South Africa's liberation struggle, the last year has been a series of shocks: fired as deputy president, ousted as the front-runner to succeed President Thabo Mbeki, indicted on bribery charges, and, most recently, put on trial on charges of raping the daughter of a family friend.

Now Mr. Zuma has begun to fight back. And it is his critics' turn to be shocked.

Taking the stand for the first time this week in the rape trial, Mr. Zuma cast himself as the embodiment of a traditional Zulu male, with all the privileges that patriarchal Zulu traditions bestow on men. Mr. Zuma, who turns 64 this week, said his accuser, a 31-year-old anti-AIDS advocate, had signaled a desire to have sex with him by wearing a knee-length skirt to his house and sitting with legs crossed, revealing her thigh.

Indeed, he said, he was actually obligated to have sex. His accuser was aroused, he said, and "in the Zulu culture, you cannot just leave a woman if she is ready." To deny her sex, he said, would have been tantamount to rape.

Such arguments have stirred a storm here, not because he insists that his accuser wanted sex — he-said, she-said arguments are not unheard of in rape trials worldwide — but because he has clothed them in what he depicts as African mores about sex and male primacy.

In South Africa, by far the most Western of African nations, the accord between centuries-old cultures and newer, more European notions of science and law has been both uneasy and unspoken. Mr. Zuma has laid it bare, effectively arguing that he is being persecuted for his cultural beliefs.