After the media hysteria, the primitive salacious interest — so very good for sales — after this, how might we best understand Jacob Zuma’s rape trial?

Zuma’s guilt or innocence on the rape charge will be decided by the court. It is, however, common cause that he had unprotected — though, according to him, consensual — sex with the complainant. He was aware she was HIV-positive. He knew she self-identifies as a lesbian.

Any efforts at reading a cultural and political happening rely on some spoken or unspoken context within which interpretation operates. And the context within which we should situate Zuma’s rape trial is the global HIV/AIDS epidemic. Southern Africa is the epicentre of this epidemic. SA, with more infected people than any other country in the world, is the epicentre of the sub-Saharan epidemic.

Commentators have already pointed to the sorry incongruity that a man who, for some years, headed our National AIDS Council (NAC), should espouse the views he did in his trial: he had unprotected sex because a condom was not available; it was against Zulu culture to leave a woman in a state of arousal; his already low risk of infection was lowered by having a postcoital shower.

Whether these views are merely part of a defence strategy is irrelevant. What matters is that our NAC has pushed ahead with its “ABC” programme as the key element in its prevention messages. Many have argued for the inadequacy of such a message. Now, we see that the man who headed the NAC failed to Abstain, that this married man would not Be Faithful, and that he failed to Condomise. To call this hypocrisy (which it is) misses a crucial opportunity: if SA, a signatory to the United Nations Special Declaration on HIV/AIDS, is to meet the targets of universal access to prevention by 2010, and to reduce the number of new infections, then our reliance on trumpeting ABC messages needs review.

Further end- orsing this urg-ency is that, according to Zuma’s daughter, Duduzile, sex was not talked about in the culture of her family. According to Zuma himself, it was against Zulu culture to refrain from sex with an aroused woman.

In a very expensive campaign some years back, key South African figures insisted that we “Talk About It” (that is, HIV/AIDS). As head of the NAC, Zuma was involved in this campaign which alluded to the awkward necessity of parents joining the prevention struggle. It recognised the fissure between traditionalism and the demands made on us by HIV/ AIDS. Now we learn that at the heart of an educated and empowered family, tradition still rules. And we ask, what hope for successful prevention campaigns?

It has become a virtual mantra of HIV/AIDS commentary that effective political leadership is key to reversing the epidemic. Yet one of our most powerful men has behaved in ways guaranteed to advance the illness.

This man also headed the Moral Regeneration Movement. Appropriately, this organisation — however feebly — concerned itself with key issues in SA, notably the HIV/AIDS pandemic and the rights of women.

Again, the dissonance is glaring. Barely a month back, head of UNAIDS Peter Piot castigated SA’s HIV/ AIDS record, saying that, among other things, we need to consider issues of gender inequality and the rights of women. It’s widely acknowledged that one factor driving HIV infections is the disempowered position of many women. According to UNAIDS, 57% of people living with HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa are women. Closer to home, the latest HSRC/ Mandela Survey, released last year, showed the infection rate among young women was up by 3% to 17%.

We need to acknowledge that this preponderant vulnerability attaching to women speaks volumes about the compromised position of women. We should acknowledge that this has much to do with “cultural” factors relating to patriarchy, gender roles and the broad “position of women” in our country.

In March this year, Michel Sidibe of UNAIDS insisted that in Africa the “AIDS epidemic has the face of our mothers, sisters and daughters”. The facts of the Zuma trial make horribly clear why this is so.

It is a truism to say practice often lags policy. That an idea takes a long time to ignite in the grate of the popular mind. That old habits (let us call them “cultural practices”) die hard.

We know the former deputy president has formerly made sensible statements about HIV/AIDS and its causes. We know the rather hopeless, one-size-fits-all message from the NAC, involved the ABC programme. Yet look at Zuma’s confessed behaviour.

Further, what a rich irony it is that the former deputy president was replaced by a woman. The symbolism is rich: it announces that SA is addressing the issue of the marginalisation and disempowerment of women. Yet a powerful man will have unprotected sex with a woman, not his wife, whom he knows is HIV- positive. Symbolism is powerful but appropriate behaviours are needed to advance a responsible cultural and political agenda.

This discordance between advocacy and behaviour ramifies into larger institutional fissures. The government has attempted to block the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) from attending the UN General Assembly’s Special Session on HIV/AIDS. Government claims that TAC will use the opportunity to attack government policy. Opposing its exclusion, TAC has claimed that “the president [and] minister of health have on numerous occasions conducted themselves unfittingly in the response to the epidemic, abused their power and obstructed the response to the epidemic”. Here the personal traits displayed by Zuma take, allegedly, institutional form.

The TAC’s views are not isolated. In March this year, Piot referred to the TAC as “the mother of all treatment access activism”. Last year, Stephen Lewis, the UN secretary-general’s special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, claimed that “every senior official engaged directly or indirectly in the struggle against AIDS, to whom I have spoken about SA, is completely bewildered by the policies of President Mbeki.” Also last year, the International Treatment Preparedness Coalition noted that SA’s latest three proposals submitted to the Global Fund for HIV/AIDS were turned down due to the “the substandard performance of the SA National AIDS Council and the health minister’s lack of leadership”. This loss is catastrophic.

To properly contextualise the Zuma trial is to note disquieting contradictions. And it is to beg troubling questions about the rights of women and, concomitantly, the power of men, about sensitivity to differences in sexual preference, and the extent to which official messages about HIV/AIDS prevention are compromised by the details of this trial.

Our answers will impact powerfully on how we as individuals and a nation position ourselves in relation to this country’s most pressing social and economic crises. Whatever our answers, we will note that people in power can mouth moral truths but not act on them. We will see a sorry example of how leadership stoops to folly and, in doing so, fails both itself and our nation.

In these grim considerations lies something of the ghastly reality that informs the sensationalism surrounding the Zuma trial.

?Trengove Jones is a senior lecturer at the School of Languages and Literature, Wits University, and has written widely on the politics of HIV/AIDS.

With acknowledgement to Tim Trengove Jones and Business Day.