The Tribunal ruling concerning Judge President Selby Mbenenge opened a door that South Africa’s legal order has long kept sealed. The door leads toward an African-centred conception of authority, evidence, and dignity. This development carries implications beyond the fate of a single judge or advocate. It speaks to the future orientation of law itself.

In this way, it stands as one of the most consequential legal moments of the post-apartheid era. The Tribunal found that the charge of sexual harassment was not established. It found that the WhatsApp exchanges between Mbenenge and Andiswa Mengo were reciprocal, consensual, and not unwelcome. It found that allegations of explicit images and a physical incident lacked evidentiary foundation. It nevertheless issued a limited finding under Article 5.1 of the Code of Judicial Conduct, confined to workplace decorum attached to judicial office, a move that sits in tension with the evidentiary conclusions that preceded it. Taken as a whole, the ruling brought to a close nearly two years of institutional interruption sustained by accusation and public insinuation, and it restored legal clarity where moral anxiety had been permitted to dominate.

That period is routinely misdescribed by liberal media. Judge President Mbenenge had not been suspended. He approached the Chief Justice and requested special leave, a deliberate act intended to protect the integrity of the Tribunal process and the credibility of its eventual findings. This distinction carries legal and ethical weight. Suspension implies imposed sanction. Special leave reflects agency, restraint, and respect for institutional process. The persistence of the suspension narrative in liberal media reporting reveals an unwillingness to relinquish a punitive frame even after the law has spoken.

Even within that context of misdescription, the outcome broke ground in a country where liberal authority continues to operate as a custodial force over African meaning. It broke ground because African relational life entered the courtroom in its full epistemic right and remained intact under legal scrutiny. It broke ground because the Tribunal chose evidence over atmosphere, method over sentiment, and law over narrative appetite. It broke ground because African dignity functioned as a juridical fact, asserted both through the disciplined advocacy of Muzi Sikhakhane and through Judge President Mbenenge’s own conduct before the Tribunal.

Advocate Muzi Sikhakhane SC did not appear as a defensive cultural intermediary. He appeared as an owner of the law. His advocacy carried the confidence of one who understands that African life requires no translation for legitimacy. Sikhakhane’s presence unsettled liberal observers because it refused the codes of deference through which white authority maintains psychological control. He spoke with passion and precision, and his disdain for epistemic supervision was neither concealed nor softened. Law arrived through him in its full authority.

Sikhakhane has unsettled liberal legal culture before. His career reflects a consistent refusal to accept the moral custodianship claimed by white institutional authority. This Tribunal intensified that refusal. His cross-examination dismantled the architecture of assumption on which the complainant’s case rested, exposing how meaning had been curated, edited, and presented as artifact for liberal consumption. He restored sequence, context, and reciprocity to evidence that had been compressed into moral shorthand. His insistence on proof displaced the expectation that African men in power must account for themselves through ritual abasement.

The Tribunal had a narrow legal task. It was convened to determine whether Judge President Mbenenge committed sexual harassment against Andiswa Mengo. Sexual harassment constitutes a defined legal harm, requiring conduct that is unwanted, persistent, and abusive of power. The Tribunal did not convene to adjudicate ideological fitness or to resolve liberal unease with African authority exercised outside prescribed emotional registers.

When the evidence was tested, the charge failed. The Tribunal found that the exchanges were consensual and reciprocal. It found that Mengo actively participated in flirtation and omitted her own messages from her initial complaint. It found that allegations of explicit images lacked forensic linkage, and that claims of a physical incident collapsed against objective records. These findings emerged from method and evidentiary discipline, applied without concession to political atmosphere.

The question that remains unresolved for many concerns the Tribunal’s decision to issue a finding under Article 5.1. This finding has since been treated as a moral consolation prize in commentary unwilling to accept the force of the primary outcome. Paragraph 99(ii), which asserts workplace impropriety affecting the administration of justice, stands unsupported by articulated evidence. The ruling does not specify which communications occurred during working hours. It identifies no policy prohibiting such communication. It demonstrates no causal link between the exchanges and any impairment of judicial efficiency or court administration. The paragraph reads as an insertion designed to temper the political consequences of a decisive legal outcome, absent the evidentiary reasoning that characterises the Tribunal’s primary findings.

This finding shifted the centre of gravity of the public story from law to symbolism.

The evidentiary record had already resolved the harassment claim. The ethical remainder then became the site where liberal authority relocated its desire for domination. Commentary acquired a new object. Demeanour functioned as the substitute ritual of adjudication. Remorse emerged as a demanded script. Submission became the currency of reinstated legitimacy. Judge President Mbenenge entered that phase of the process under conditions where his presence itself became the target.

Mbenenge’s conduct throughout the process disrupted liberal expectation. He acknowledged participation in flirtation without transforming that acknowledgment into confession. He refused abjection, the condition Fanon identified as the demand that the African subject present himself as broken, penitential, and morally diminished in order to be recognised as legitimate within a white-governed symbolic order. He accepted responsibility where it existed and rejected pathology where it did not. This posture unsettled a prescriptive order that depends on African diminishment for coherence.

The liberal media response followed a familiar pattern. Headlines blurred acquittal on sexual harassment with decorum findings. Commentary implied guilt while avoiding legal precision. Attention shifted toward tone, posture, and affect. Sikhakhane’s assertiveness became a fixation. Mbenenge’s composure became a provocation.

Marianne Thamm and Karyn Maughan framed Sikhakhane’s courtroom presence as aggression and excess. They rehearsed a script in which African authority, exercised without deference, registers as threat. Such portrayals sustain the fantasy of ownership that liberal authority maintains over African institutional space. Fanon described this reaction as the anxiety that surfaces when control over meaning begins to slip, prompting narrative intervention where legal authority has withdrawn permission.

That narrative intervention did not succeed in overturning the legal outcome, yet it did not fully withdraw either. It persisted as an after-pressure, working to reassert interpretive authority at the level of commentary once the courtroom itself had closed that avenue.

The pattern of the compensatory ethical finding is an old one. Fanon described it as a technique of colonial governance in which authority concedes just enough to preserve its dominance. The Black subject is released from the primary charge, yet held in place through a residual finding that maintains moral supervision. Punishment recedes, while indebtedness remains. Recognition is granted without sovereignty. The Article 5.1 finding follows this lineage.

What this Tribunal revealed is the fragility of that intervention. Method prevailed. Evidence prevailed. African meaning held its ground in its full epistemic right.

The public response across Black public space reflected recognition of that shift. The response carried affect, relief, and affirmation grounded in the experience of seeing African language, intimacy, and authority addressed by law without distortion or reduction to artifact. The moment resonated because African meaning entered a judicial forum and remained intact.

Fanon wrote that liberation begins when the colonised subject ceases to seek recognition through imitation. In this Tribunal, African authority appeared without mimicry. The law listened.

That listening broke ground in a country where white supremacy continues to operate through both right-wing and liberal grammar. It broke ground because African meaning retained its form. It broke ground because Muzi Sikhakhane exercised authority without submission and because Judge President Mbenenge occupied institutional space without subjective collapse. Law followed reason.

This ruling restored the law to its proper orientation by insisting that evidence govern authority and that African dignity operate as juridical fact. It demonstrated that liberation can occur within institutions when African authority enters in its full epistemic right and without submission to imposed ritualised obedience.

The sole disruption within this otherwise disciplined and coherent ruling lies in the Article 5.1 finding, which appears unsupported by articulated evidence, policy reference, or demonstrated impact on the administration of justice, and which reads as accommodation to political pressure not demanded by method. That aspect of the ruling warrants challenge, as a continuation of the same evidentiary discipline that made the outcome on sexual harassment both sound and historic.

The ruling established a marker. African epistemic authority entered the courtroom with juridical confidence. The law responded with substantial clarity, even as a residual ethical finding revealed the limits of liberal appeasement. The future now carries both the achievement and the unfinished work it demands.

* Gillian Schutte is a South African writer, filmmaker, poet, and uncompromising social justice activist. Founder of Media for Justice and co-owner of handHeld Films, she is recognised for hard-hitting documentaries and incisive opinion pieces that dismantle whiteness, neoliberal capitalism, and imperial power.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media. 

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