CARMEL RICKARD: Long walk for women
Mduduzi Manana, Grace Mugabe and an unusual inheritance case in the courts all help to make August a month to remember (but not in a good way)
August 2017 was a tougher-than-usual SA Women’s Month. It began with the deputy minister of higher education, Mduduzi Manana, giving a dramatic, personal, late-night lesson on the reality of gender violence, viciously assaulting at least two women. A couple of weeks later, government officials retro-gifted immunity from prosecution to Grace Mugabe, wife of Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe, after she assaulted a woman at a Johannesburg hotel. Another lesson here, not about government cowardice and failure to uphold human rights — we have known this for a long time — but rather that violence against women may sometimes be carried out with impunity by other women, particularly when the attacker is more powerful. While the morgues, hospitals and courts produced the usual number of femicide and rape cases in August, one extraordinary civil matter caught my attention. It was brought by the co-executors of a will who asked whether a court may amend the wording of a testament — in this ca...
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