What if the Inquisition against JP Mbenenge Is Not What It Seems?

IOL News

2 days ago

The Judicial Conduct Tribunal against Judge President Selby Mbenenge raises critical questions about power dynamics, cultural interpretations of flirtation, and the implications of colonial legacies in contemporary South Africa.
Image: Office of the Chief Justice / S Lioners
What if the public spectacle of the Judicial Conduct Tribunal against Judge President Selby Mbenenge is not just a hearing on alleged misconduct, but a broader political spectacle playing out a familiar choreography, one that disciplines deviant Black masculinity, regulates African erotic discourse, and shores up a liberal feminist orthodoxy whose selective outrage echoes imperial scripts?
What if this is about more than flirtation, more than gendered accusations, and more than the legalistic framing of consent? What if this is also about the steady rollback of decolonial thinking in the judiciary, about an African judge who moved to rename colonial courtrooms after African ancestry, about a man who issued directives that dismantled the nomenclature of conquest and whose political work has now made him a target?
What if this trial is doing something else altogether, reminding us of how postcolonial power operates when presented in the garments of liberal virtue? It demands we ask: why him, and why now?
Judge President Selby Mbenenge is accused of coercing a younger subordinate, Andiswa Mengo, into a flirtatious, sexually suggestive exchange. His defence argues that the exchanges were mutual, desired, and situated in the realm of flirtation, known in isiXhosa culture as ukudlalisa ngamazwi (word play), a subtle and socially understood interplay of timing, gesture, tone, and consent. This is not a courtship that obeys the gender scripts of white feminism. It lives in layered codes, ancestral gestures, and unspoken rhythms. It is not easily reduced to the crude binaries of predator and victim.
Why is this epistemic complexity so terrifying to the legal and media apparatus?
What if, in this case, flirtation and desire, performed by an African man and an African woman, have been recoded through a punitive lens precisely because they elude the colonial scripts that still dominate our cultural and institutional life?
In isiXhosa, when a woman lowers her gaze and shields her face while responding to attention, this is known as ukumutsa. It is not submission. It is a performative signal, an invitation to play. It does not exist in English legal terminology. When Judge Mbenenge referenced this in his testimony, he was not evading guilt. He was offering an epistemology. But the tribunal seemed to lack the literacy to read it.
Instead, the exchange was hastily cast as evidence of harassment. The entire dynamic was squeezed into a familiar morality play. But who gets to decide what constitutes coercion when the cultural script itself is erased?
And what if this erasure is deliberate?
Judge Mbenenge is one of the few figures in the judiciary who has actively challenged colonial inheritances. After the successful renaming of Grahamstown to Makhanda and Port Elizabeth to Gqeberha, he issued a directive that instructed the courts in the Eastern Cape to adopt these indigenous names. This was not performative decoloniality. It was structural. It was language that honoured African lineage and replaced the geography of conquest.
And this is when the backlash began.
What if his bold insistence on naming, which is the first act of power in both colonial conquest and indigenous resistance, became intolerable to the establishment? What if this tribunal is not only about a woman's complaint, but about neutralising a man who exercised full African agency in his will to unseat the symbols of white power embedded in every legal form and every case citation?
It is telling that the media reporting on the case has reproduced a narrow, wilfully decontextualised narrative. Karyn Maughan's coverage, for instance, opened with a headline stating that the judge admitted the complainant had 'led him on.' The framing was deliberately reductionist. It stripped out the cultural discourse, the flirtation, the ambiguity, the mutuality. It wrote Mengo out of her own erotic agency and turned her into a universal victim. But why is this erasure acceptable when it serves a specific ideological end?
An army of liberal feminists, most of whom operate within donor-aligned NGOs and academic enclaves, have worked to shape this case into another totemic example of male guilt and female violation. But they have failed to ask deeper questions. What happens when African legal customs are put on trial by an imported ideology? What happens when our courts and media act in tandem to purge the system of anyone whose thinking does not toe the liberal orthodoxy?
Why, too, has no one interrogated the conduct of Scheepers, the investigator in the matter, whose deliberate mishandling and inadequate investigation of evidence has led to key omissions? Why has the media refused to ask whether this failure might speak to something larger, a rush to a guilty verdict before all complexities are weighed?
And perhaps most disturbingly, what happens to Andiswa Mengo, whose deliciously erotic banter, playful winks, and flirtatious agency have now been traded in for injury? She has been cast as a passive figure in a morality tale, rather than seen in the full dimensionality of her womanhood, someone who joked, flirted, asked for a hug, and engaged in suggestive repartee. Is this the feminism we are left with? One that erases African women's agency under the guise of protecting them?
What if we allowed for a more complicated truth, one in which flirtation is mutual, desire is messy, and no one is entirely innocent or guilty?
The case against Mbenenge invites us to revisit the spectacle of Amber Heard, whose courtroom theatrics revealed the distortions of liberal feminist ideology. Despite clear contradictions, withheld evidence, and demonstrable lies, she was upheld by liberal media and NGO networks as a global symbol of victimhood. A similar strategy appears to be in motion in Mengo's case. Her team omitted her own erotically charged messages from the evidence, while the evidence leader, Scheepers, also failed to pursue basic investigative protocols, including checking car tracking data, verifying time codes, and cross-referencing dates on which serious allegations were made. These omissions are not minor. They suggest a deliberate orchestration of a one-dimensional story. Mengo is now cast as a passive vessel of harm, her flirtation erased, her agency hollowed out, all to serve a script authored elsewhere. But what is lost when a woman's full erotic, intellectual, and cultural subjectivity is sacrificed on the altar of donor-aligned feminist orthodoxy?
This is not a call to dismiss gendered injustice. It is a call to ask harder questions about how that injustice is constructed, interpreted, and amplified through media, law, and ideology.
The stakes are high. When decolonial African figures are selectively purged from institutions under the banner of gender justice, we must look more closely. We must ask who benefits from the fall of this judge, who has radically reconfigured colonial legacies in our legal system, and whose cultural literacy offers an alternative to imported feminist frameworks.
We are not being asked to hold two truths. We are being asked to choose between a script of victimhood that forecloses ambiguity and a deeper truth that resists translation.
And in that resistance lies the real threat.
* Gillian Schutte is a South African writer, filmmaker and social critic. She writes on decoloniality, media and political resistance across the Global South.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.