By Gillian Schutte
Abstract
The 2025 Judicial Conduct Tribunal concerning allegations of sexual harassment against Eastern Cape Judge President Selby Mbenenge has inaugurated a shift in South African jurisprudence. This essay offers a close analysis of how the hearing exposed the embedded coloniality of whiteness in legal interpretation, particularly through the performance of expert knowledge. The cross-examination by Advocate Muzi Sikhakhane produced a fundamental epistemic shift. Through his methodical and culturally grounded dismantling of white liberal feminist certainty, Sikhakhane initiated a decolonial moment within the courtroom that challenges the foundational grammar of legal meaning-making in the post-apartheid order.
In July 2025, a Judicial Conduct Tribunal convened to examine whether Judge Selby Mbenenge had engaged in inappropriate, coercive digital communication with his secretary, Andiswa Mengo. The case was based primarily on the content of 837 WhatsApp messages exchanged over a period of several months in 2021. The messages were originally composed in isiXhosa and then translated into English. The translations formed the basis of the analysis presented by gender violence expert Dr Lisa Vetten, who was called to testify in support of Mengo’s claim that the communications constituted sexual harassment.
Vetten’s testimony presented a familiar structure of authority. Her position as expert rested on an institutional history in which white feminist analysis has become the dominant interpretive lens through which power and gender are understood in South African legal culture. Her reading of the messages suggested a dynamic of coercion in which Judge Mbenenge, as the senior figure in the workplace, exercised subtle but persistent pressure over his subordinate. The claim was not limited to content. It was grounded in the structural reality of workplace hierarchy and the presumed inability of a subordinate to meaningfully consent within that context.
Her conclusions, though delivered with the tone of clinical certainty, were based on English translations of isiXhosa exchanges. Under cross-examination, she admitted to removing significant portions of the messages from her report. This selective construction of evidence was not framed as manipulation but as the routine act of curation carried out by experts tasked with interpretation. Yet the omission of entire segments of the exchange signalled something deeper. It revealed a sustained logic within legal culture that privileges white feminist readings of harm while sidelining the cultural and linguistic complexity of African communication.
It was in this context that Advocate Muzi Sikhakhane intervened. His cross-examination of Vetten introduced an explosive alchemical energy into the tribunal. His posture was composed, his tone deliberate, his method sharpened by intellectual rigour. He did not waver in his approach, nor did he seek to dominate by volume. He occupied space with the gravitas of one who carries memory. His presence was disciplined and unshifting. It communicated a refusal to accept the implicit assumption that whiteness, when presented in the language of care, is exempt from critique.
Sikhakhane stood not only in defence of his client. He stood as an intellectual figure situated within a long lineage of Black thinkers who have insisted on the right of African people to speak for themselves. His body registered the quiet, immovable authority of one who understood the racialised architecture of South African legal discourse. His face remained composed, but his eyes held the sharpness of insight shaped through years of watching the law perform racial hierarchy while insisting on its neutrality. A flicker of contained contempt passed across his features when Vetten repeated her interpretation without acknowledging the limits of her framework. The expression was not personal. It was historical.
His line of questioning was careful and precise. He directed Vetten to confront the gaps in her report. He asked her to account for the segments she had removed. He requested clarity on her lack of language fluency. He led her to acknowledge that her interpretation, grounded in translated fragments and devoid of cultural texture, might be incomplete. His silence between questions carried weight. He allowed the courtroom to feel the implications of her omissions. He made visible the power that she exercised without scrutiny.
As the questions accumulated, the strain showed. Vetten flushed. Her face, trying desperately to hold onto its embedded authority, betrayed many moments of uncertainty. She faltered. At times, one could detect a flicker of the very contempt she sought to project onto the accused, a contempt that she would then attempt to conceal behind quick, disarming moments of meekness. Her composure bent under the weight of the contradictions in her testimony, but she clung to the performance of neutrality.
Sikhakhane, never raised in volume or aggression, kept invoking her as an intellectual. He repeated the title with intention. This was not flattery. It was strategic. In naming her as an intellectual, he denied her any retreat into naiveté or emotive deflection. He insisted that she remain within the domain of reason, that she own the authority she claimed. The move ensured she could not disavow her interpretive power. It was a forcing of recognition, a refusal to allow whiteness to perform innocence while wielding the tools of judgment.
It was during this exchange that Sikhakhane employed the term trust. The word arrived with sharp semantic force. In most courtrooms, trust refers to the reliability of method or professional conduct. In this context, it operated as a challenge to the unexamined power of whiteness in South African institutions. Whiteness has long assumed the right to interpret. Its proximity to law, science, and policy has granted it presumed objectivity. Blackness, by contrast, has occupied a space of suspect meaning. It has been required to explain, to decode itself, to perform clarity for the benefit of the white gaze. To ask whether Vetten’s reading could be trusted was to expose the racial economy of epistemic credibility.
This moment also forced a confrontation with the deep historical residue of how Black male sexuality has been positioned within colonial and apartheid discourses. For centuries, the Black man has been cast as hypersexual, aggressive, and lacking in moral restraint. His desire has been pathologised. His masculinity has been read as a threat, especially when directed — or imagined to be directed — toward women, and particularly white women. This construct has travelled from colonial science into modern law and social policy, often unspoken but always present. The courtroom remains one of the last spaces where this myth can still operate under the guise of protection. Within this framework, Mbenenge’s digital communication was approached through this very lens. The racialised myth of deviance formed the unspoken backdrop against which his words were measured.
Sikhakhane’s use of trust functioned as a counter to this logic. It pointed toward the violence of assumption and the fragility of evidence when built upon centuries of racial coding. The question was not only whether Mbenenge had overstepped a line, but who had drawn that line, in what language, and with what historical baggage.
The hearing also highlighted the complex role that liberal feminism continues to play in racialised society. The case served to remind us that liberal feminism, while often positioned as a politics of solidarity, has historically depended on the stewardship of Black women’s pain to justify its own moral purpose. In this logic, the suffering of Black women becomes a means through which white feminist authority is reaffirmed. Mengo’s messages were never analysed from the standpoint of her cultural subjectivity. They were rerouted through a white feminist lens that recognised her vulnerability while appropriating her voice. The silence in her responses was interpreted as refusal, her deferrals read as distress. But within many African cultural contexts, these may also reflect dignity, social protocol, or strategic ambiguity. Vetten’s interpretation lacked the cultural knowledge required to distinguish between compliance, politeness, discomfort, and resistance.
This absence of cultural grounding produced an expert reading that functioned as erasure. Mengo’s ambiguity was reinterpreted as helplessness. Her relational context was stripped of language, nuance, and location. In removing substantial portions of the exchanges, Vetten enacted a familiar disciplinary gesture. The flattening of African complexity into usable evidence for Western theory. Her omissions were not simply analytical. They were epistemological. They reiterated the long-standing refusal to allow African meaning to exist on its own terms.
What Sikhakhane produced in response was not a counter-theory. It was a decolonial exposure. He placed whiteness in the position of having to explain itself. He interrupted the presumed transparency of white feminist authority. He did so through posture, through the weight of stillness, through the precise deployment of language, and through an acute understanding of the political function of trust in legal interpretation.
This tribunal marked a turning point in South African law. It demonstrated that the monopoly of interpretation is no longer secure. It showed that white expertise, when exposed to cultural scrutiny, cannot stand uncontested. It revealed that African language, when defended with care and authority, cannot be flattened into translated fragments and reassembled by those outside its meaning systems. The courtroom, usually a space in which colonial logics are reproduced in procedural form, became a place of ideological confrontation.
This moment redefined the terms of legal engagement. It signalled that whiteness is no longer invisible in the realm of interpretation. It revealed that legal discourse, when confronted by epistemic precision from African intellectuals, is vulnerable to reconstitution. It shifted the axis of meaning-making. It asserted that African experience is not a passive object of analysis. It affirmed that African subjectivity is capable of speaking its own complexity, without being ventriloquised through the frameworks of imported theory.
What happened in that hearing was far from symbolic. It was structural. The interpretive order of post-apartheid South African law has been altered. The act of naming, so often the privilege of whiteness, was reclaimed by a figure who did not need to posture to be heard. Sikhakhane reminded the judiciary, and the public, that dignity is not granted through validation. It is asserted through presence, through intellect, and through the refusal to be translated.
This case has irrevocably altered the landscape of South African legal consciousness. It did not do so through brute confrontation, but through the undeniable realisation that liberal orthodoxy cannot be exempt from scrutiny. The courtroom became a space of intellectual disobedience, of epistemic eruption. It became a stage upon which the coloniality of power was quietly, devastatingly, dismantled. And it will be remembered as a moment where the law, as it is practiced, was forced to acknowledge the limits of its own gaze.