We will always #RememberKhwezi

Fezekile Kuzwayo who has died in Durban at the age of 42 was savagely vilified after she laid a charge of rape against then deputy president Jacob Zuma in 2005.

To protect her identity she was referred to in media coverage of the trial as Khwezi.

However, it didn't stop Zuma supporters led by the ANC Women's League and ANC Youth League baying for her blood outside the Johannesburg High Court and even burning her in effigy.

Zuma was acquitted in 2006 but the campaign of hatred and intimidation against Kuzwayo continued.

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In 2007 she and her mother, Beauty Sibongile Kuzwayo, fled the country after their home was burnt down and Zuma's supporters threatened to “burn the bitch”. They were granted asylum in Holland.

Kuzwayo's father Judson had spent 10 years in a cell with Zuma on Robben Island. He was arrested in 1963 for leaving South Africa illegally for military training. After his release in 1973 he worked at the University of Natal Centre for Apartheid Social Science.

He left South Africa in 1977 after being harassed and detained again by the security police. He was in the ANC underground in Swaziland where he and his wife put up and cared for cadres who were passing through. One of those they helped in this way was Zuma, who was regarded as a close family friend.

After serving as the ANC chief representative in Lesotho Kuzwayo's father was sent as the party's chief representative to Zimbabwe.

He died in a car crash in Zimbabwe in 1985 at the age of 43.

Kuzwayo, who was born in September 1974, led a life of hardship in exile after the death of her father. She was abused and raped several times. In 2007 she told Dutch journalist Kees Broere in De Volkskrant newspaper of a culture in exile where comrades would rape female comrades. No one dared talk about it and nothing was done about it, she said.

Ironically, these traumatic experiences in exile were used against her by Zuma's team in court to cast aspersions on her morality and bolster their argument that she wanted sex with Zuma.

She and her mother returned to South Africa from Zambia in 1990 shortly after the release of Nelson Mandela.

In 1999 she was diagnosed with HIV. While working for an Aids NGO Kuzwayo, who identified as lesbian, began seeing more of Zuma who was by then deputy president and chairman of the National Aids Council.

He told her stories of her father and she came to think of Zuma as a second father. She sent him text messages, bought him presents and stayed over at his home in Johannesburg.

In 2004 when she said she wanted to study in Australia Zuma persuaded her not to, telling her it was too far away and she would be lonely. He offered to find her a job.

Kuzwayo said he then began to show more than normal interest in her.

Zuma told the court the sex between them was consensual. He testified that Kuzwayo was wearing a kanga (a traditional cloth) at the time and that he interpreted this as an invitation to have sex with her.

The sex was unprotected but Zuma said he took a shower afterwards to avoid contracting HIV.

In 2008, Kuzwayo published a poem, “I am Khanga,” in a Dutch magazine, and performed it dressed in a khanga at the opening of the “Identity, Power and Connection” exhibition in Holland the same year.

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"I am not here to please a man/And I certainly am not a seductress/Please don’t use me as an excuse to rape/Don’t hide behind me when you choose to abuse.

My world is a world where fathers protect and don’t rape/My world is a world where a woman can speak out/Without fear for her safety/My world is a world where no one , but no one is above the law", she wrote.

She and her mother returned from Holland in 2011. Kuzwayo lived a semi-hidden existence.

Recently ANC veteran Ronnie Kasrils who was a friend of her father's in exile established a trust for her with R500,000 he was awarded in settlement of a defamation case he brought against deputy minister of Defence Kebby Maphatsoe who claimed that Kasrils had orchestrated the rape charges against Zuma and that Fezeka had been sent to him as a “honey trap”.

It was Kasrils Kuzwayo called first after her alleged rape by Zuma.

In August 2016 a group of students staged a silent anti-rape protest at the IEC results centre in Johannesburg as President Zuma rose to speak. They held handwritten pieces of paper which read “I am one in three”, “Ten Years Later", “Khanga” and “Remember Khwezi”.

1974-2016