The black widows of South Africa

This is a taster from an investigation I'm working on...

"Thinking of your reason to meet me is very haunting. It is like digging what I want to forget. I think we need to arrange to meet face-to-face for your interview. We are about to go to lunch. Sorry to sound so complicated.”

I had been trying to get hold of Senior Chief Nokhakha Jumba for two days. It was broken wires and cross communication and when I eventually found her office in downtown Mthatha, the potholed capital of the old Transkei, she wasn’t there. She was across town at one of those rural development conferences where people arrive in high heels and Mercedes Benz. I felt like giving up. My gut didn’t. A few hours later this text message beeped through.

I wanted to meet Nokhakha for the same reason I’d been meeting her contemporaries: she’s a woman chief, one of a growing number in South Africa. Before 1994 and a new Constitution that guarantees equal rights for women, women chiefs were rare. The chief line passes from father to firstborn son, and if the father died before the son was grown up, an uncle or cousin would hold the fort until he was ready. Mandela changed all of this. “Mr Mandela insisted that the women as well become chiefs because everyone is equal in front of the people,” said Chief Nokwanele Balizulu, the woman chief who lives in a mint green house with pink linoleum floors directly across the road from Mandela’s fortified facebrick mansion in Qunu.

But not everyone shares Mandela’s vision.

The day before, in the wilting heat of a Sunday afternoon, I’d met Chief Lindiwe Ngubenani at a safe house near Mqanduli. Lindiwe is 27 years old. She was wearing a pink sundress and big loop earrings, and twirled her hair in her fingers as she told me her story. After her father died her mother became the chief of Mthonjana, a village of 84 homes near the hippy hangout of Coffee Bay, famed for its untouched beaches and marijuana plantations. The villagers protested. They spread rumours that Xolisa was not the real son of the chief, they insulted her, threatened her, and on 24 September 2007, they assassinated her. “They shot her inside the hut and then they burnt the hut and her body was lying inside,” Lindiwe said, the firstborn child who must take charge until her brother has completed her education. But she too fears for her life. “I am not at home now because people are not accepting me. About 10 homes out of 74 support me. People are divided. They say they cannot be ruled by a woman, especially by a girl.”

Looking at Lindiwe lounging on the brown velour couch, her mini-dress riding up her thighs, her flip-flops dangling loosely from her painted toe-nails, she doesn’t much look like a chief. I wondered how I’d feel if she was the person I had to go to whenever I needed a signed affidavit, or needed someone to mediate when my neighbour does some thing to harm me, or my family, or my land. It’s not something an urban South African would ever have to think about.

Democracy was fought and won in the cities, and people who live in the urban centres rely on the police and the municipalities to keep order - or at least a semblance. In the city, if your neighbour parks his car on your driveway every day without your consent, you complain to the police. In the village, if you neighbour’s cow parks itself on your grass every day, the police don't care. In fact, the closest police station is likely to be 50km down a rutted track and you don't own a car.

The chief is to the villager, what the head of the body corporate is to the urbanite. It’s the person who settles the squabbles and makes sure you all live peacefully side by side. Well, that's the job description. Not all chiefs are good chiefs. Some are cruel, harsh, lazy - made lazier by the recently introduced government salary - and those villagers saddled with a rotten egg protest that this system is out-of-step with the South African democracy. But there's also those chiefs who do care, whose heart and feet are from the soil. Rural residents in these villages prefer a chief who's in it for life, who's born to it, rather than an ANC-appointed municipal officer who's in it for 5-years and a fat pay cheque.

But what of the women chiefs? They’re a new breed. They’re neither born nor elected. They are widows. Black widows to some.