Carnivorous Cow and the lawyer were having fun. Like millions of others, they were discussing The Zuma Allegations, speculating wildly and getting completely carried away on the alcoholic tide that bouyed them. Their companions had fallen silent, reduced to spectating the increasingly animated conversation playing out before them.
B had started it - suggesting that JZ had the worst of all possible timing; getting fingered for corruption during a Moral Regeneration drive, and now, getting charged with rape during the 16 days of activism against Violence Against Women. The lawyer and the Cow had pounced on the bait with relish.
"It's his own doing!" argued the lawyer. "If he was completely above suspicion, the Shaik trial outcome would have exonerated him, and the media would have been less frenzied in their reporting of the rape allegations!"
"It has little to do with luck," agreed the Cow. "Remember, this man was a patron of loveLife. He was on record supporting the loveLife campaigns and messages, yet when questioned about his views on oral sex - advocated by loveLife as a safer alternative to vanilla sex - he decried it as 'unnatural'. That's not luck, that's stupidity. Like Shane Warne agreeing to be the face of young smokeless Australia, and then getting snapped lighting up. If you're going to advocate something, at least in public don't let your behaviour contradict that. It doesn't do your credibility much good!"
"Do you think he's guilty?" asked the lawyer. "Do you think the courts will find him guilty?"
"Hard to tell," offered the Cow,"it depends on how important he's seen to The National Project. The two not being the same - guilt, and being found guilty - in the public eye anyway. Ask anyone about Michael Jackson. Or OJ Simpson. Or Makhaya Ntini!"
"What do they all have in common?" asked the lawyer, wryly. His demographics matched theirs. "Money! Good lawyers! A well-oiled spin machine. Where is the place for truth in all of that?"
Carnivorous Cow considered - albeit briefly - pouncing on this violation of post-modernism, simply for the fun of tormenting the lawyer with his own political correctness, but it seemed inappropriate to the setting. "Shoo!" and "Hey bru" seemed far more relevant things to say than "Rashomon" or "relativism", so she let it pass. "Makhaya Ntini," she reminded B, who was looking perplexed, "was found not guilty, on appeal." "Because," roared the lawyer triumphantly, "the SA cricket team needed black talent! It was important to The National Project that black men be seen as role models, talented performers, not just thugs and reprobates. They needed black male heroes, especially in an historically white arena like cricket! Had he been a soccer player, his appeal may not have succeeded."
"Who decides," the Cow mused aloud, "which should take precedence, in The National Project - race, or gender, issues? Clearly, if gender had been top of the agenda, different considerations would have arisen, and the outcome may have been different."
B attempted an interjection. "Shouldn't justice be objective, though? You're suggesting that justice is a fallacy!"
The lawyer snorted into his beer. Carnivorous Cow shrugged. "Justice always reflects the mores of the day. It must. And, while the system should be designed in such a way to maximise some *sense* of objectivity, with some recourse built in to higher levels should the parties feel that Justice has not been served, it is, in the end, operationalised by human beings, who are subjective vessels of their own prejudices and proclivities. Yes, they fall back on precedent and case law, but in choosing *which* to consider, they're exercising subjective judgment. In choosing which evidence, which argument, which voice, to privilege over others, they're exercising subjective judgment. It's inevitable."
"So," the lawyer added, "just as some hold the view that the complainant was sacrified in the Ntini trial for The Greater Good, JZ may be 'sacrificed' now for the Greater Good of being seen to take gender seriously - or HIV, or whatever other issues are embodied in this complainant, this set of circumstances - as well as Good Governance and a Firm Stance on Corruption."
Carnivorous Cow stared into her glass and mused a while. When national politics seemed as murky and riven with the Spy-vs-Spy scenarios of Campus, it was cause for worry.