By: Gillian Schutte (uMamakaKai)
What unfolds in the Judicial Tribunal of Judge President Selby Mbenenge is more than a battle between accuser and accused. It is a struggle over meaning. And not just legal meaning, but social, sexual, and political meaning. It is a contest over how a Black woman’s flirtation, ambiguity, and bold sexual expression is to be read — and how it is flattened by expert feminist discourse into the safer terrain of victimhood. It is a trial against African epistemologies. A confrontation between the expressive ambiguity of isiXhosa wordplay and the coercive clarity demanded by Western law.
At the heart of this epistemic clash is the criminalisation of ukudlalisa ngamazwi — a cultural idiom of flirtation and wordplay that permits nuance, provocation, irony, and desire without linearity. The courtroom, steeped in colonial grammar and liberal feminist narratives, cannot comprehend this expressive mode. It seeks instead to convert every utterance into evidence, every metaphor into confession, and every flirtation into pathology.
Dr Lisa Vetten, the state’s gender violence expert, is brought in to provide interpretive authority over the meaning of the complainant Andiswa Mengo’s text messages. Yet she does not ask how ukudlalisa ngamazwi functions culturally. She does not consider how African women have historically used double meanings, storytelling, and sexual innuendo to subvert patriarchal norms. Instead, she interprets Mengo’s words through a Western lens that demands trauma where there is play, and reads disempowerment where there is erotic agency. Her analysis depends on stripping the woman of voice so that the state can speak for her.
But Mengo’s digital trace resists this erasure. She writes that as an African woman, she prefers that when a man takes interest in her, he must be direct and not beat about the bush. Mengo also writes “hlala ubawa ukwenzela ufike unomdla” — translated as “remain drooling so that when you get to me, you desire me even more”; “uyandiphazamisa, my blood is getting warm, mandigqibe le ndiyenzayo” — “you distract me, my blood is getting warm, let me finish what I am currently doing.” These are texts situated in the idiom of ukudlalisa ngamazwi, where language is not a neutral medium but a terrain of erotic contestation.
The misreading of isiXhosa goes further. The terms intombi encinci (“young girl”), intombi enkulu (“older girl/woman”), and ntombi ndala (“elder maiden/woman”) form part of a nuanced isiXhosa lexicon that encodes age, respect, and relational dynamics in ways that are culturally grounded and socially textured. These expressions are not fixed titles — they are situational, relational, and often infused with warmth, play, and intimacy.
Yet, in the context of the Mbenenge tribunal, these culturally specific terms were seized upon in a kind of white lexical police raid — stripped of their layered meanings and recast through a lens of suspicion and pathology. Advocate Scheepers, followed by the liberal press, reduced intombi encinci and intombi enkulu to the crude binaries of “little girl” and “big girl,” uprooting them from their relational context and reinscribing them with Western anxieties around power, sex, and control. This linguistic flattening amounts to a colonial misreading — one that frames isiXhosa cultural expression as incriminating rather than intimate, and once again subjects African languages to the court of white misinterpretation.
While intombi encinci can imply youthfulness or emotional proximity, intombi enkulu may denote seniority, responsibility, or a protective presence. Ntombi ndala extends this further, suggesting wisdom, maturity, and often a role of deference or guidance — yet it does not denote authority in a hierarchical, Western sense. Instead, it reflects a deep cultural etiquette rooted in ubuntu, where respect flows in multiple directions depending on context, tone, and intention.
Importantly, these phrases function within the broader practice of ukudlalisa ngamazwi, where language becomes a site of mutual recognition and often flirtatious interplay. This is a realm where younger people can tease elders, elders can respond with mock submission, and roles are not bound to rigid identities but fluid performances. It is in this shared rhythm of expression that intimacy is negotiated — with humour, respect, and a finely tuned sense of what is socially permissible.
To read these terms through a Western framework — where “little girl” may evoke paedophilia or disempowerment, and “big girl” might imply sexual dominance or adult authority — is to misread the entire cultural grammar. It imposes a foreign logic on a living language, turning symbolic affection into something pathological. Such misreadings not only erase the indigenous meanings of these expressions but also criminalise the cultural forms in which Black intimacy, wit, and eroticism are held.
In isiXhosa, these terms do not operate in the service of patriarchy. They exist in a relational structure that honours age, play, and consent — where power is not owned, but felt, and where language is never neutral but always alive with social meaning.
They emerge within a broader practice of ukudlalisa ngamazwi — a linguistic dance that thrives on humour, ambiguity, and mutual consent. Within this space, power is not imposed; it is negotiated, often with irony and performance. Men and women alike may take up roles that reverse social expectations — a younger woman might tease an elder man, who responds with mock submission. This is not a game of control, but one of shared cultural fluency.
To cast such exchanges through a Western lens of patriarchy or infantilisation is to commit an act of epistemic violence — one that strips the terms of their meaning and re-inscribes them with foreign anxieties. It is to impose an alien framework onto a relational language system that, while aware of status and age, is not necessarily patriarchal, coercive, or unequal. Understanding these terms on their own terms requires listening through the logic of isiXhosa, rather than translating it into the grammar of Western liberalism.
For example, in isiXhosa cultural practice, if one addresses a younger male in a professional or communal setting, terms such as ndodana (son or young man), nyana (son), or ndodencinane (small man) may be used — not to diminish the person, but to affirm relationship, respect, and warmth. Conversely, when addressing an elder or someone of notable stature, terms like ndodenkulu (big man) might be used, again to convey esteem and dignity. These expressions exist within a register of ubuntu and are steeped in relational recognition — not hierarchy. Much like intombi enkulu or intombazana encinci, these phrases carry layered meaning. When stripped of their cultural density and run through a liberal feminist or Western legal filter, they risk being flattened into projections of patriarchy or impropriety — missing entirely the intimacy, context, and linguistic diplomacy at play.
In isiXhosa, flirtation is an art form. It unfolds in registers of rhythm, metaphor, and provocation. It is relational rather than declarative. The man may call himself overwhelmed, saying “Uyayazi le nto uyenzayo” — “You know exactly what you’re doing.” The woman may reply with “Ndiyadlala nje” — “I’m just playing.” The ambiguity is the point. It creates space for power to move in more than one direction.
The message exchange between Mengo and Judge Mbenenge unfolds as a dynamic interplay of mutual flirtation and coded language. Mengo jokes about positions, saying she is “ready to be surprised,” sends late-night texts requesting attention. She writes in response to a request for a photograph by Mbenenge “yisebenzele” which tranlstes to “earn it”. The tone is suggestive and reciprocal — with teasing about feeling “heated up,” and declarations of anticipation. In one message, she writes “Yazba uzandinika mna imali xa ndiyifuna” — “You must know you will give me money when I ask for it.” In response, Mbenenge texts “semnandi” — a term that can mean “appetising,” “nice,” or “enjoyable.” She tells him “wena undenza shy” — “you make me shy.” This reciprocal teasing, layered with innuendo, does not read as the communication of someone coerced. Rather, it reflects a shared game — an exchange operating in the ambiguous terrain between pleasure, power, and calculated intimacy. What is later flattened in the courtroom into a narrative of exploitation may more accurately reflect the messiness of human interaction, especially in a context where flirtation, advantage, and emotional entanglement blur clear binaries of victim and perpetrator.
Mengo is no passive recipient of attention. She engages, sets the tone, withdraws, and ultimately blocks Mbenenge. This is critical. It is the line of refusal, the drawing of a boundary. She acts. She decides. She ends the exchange. Yet this act is not interpreted by the court as an assertion of power, but as a delayed cry for help. Her erotic agency is made to disappear under the weight of state feminism.
Her sexuality is not inert — it is luminous, mischievous, and self-directed. It plays, provokes, and performs. It is not merely a response to male desire but a presence in its own right, breathing with intention and delight. She flirts with confidence, she sets terms, she censors, she withdraws, and she blocks. Her decision to end the exchange with Mbenenge is not necessarily a retreat into fear, but possibly a moment of re-evaluation, fatigue, or simply disinterest. We do not know why she stopped. But we do know that she acted. She said: enough. That is not silence. It is speech. It is authorship. Yet the courtroom logic demands that women renounce joy and ambiguity in favour of scripted victimhood. Only then are they heard.
Advocate Muzi Sikhakhane, in his incisive cross-examination, challenges the foundational assumptions of the tribunal. He argues that the messages cannot be read outside of their linguistic and cultural context. He insists that isiXhosa expressions do not operate according to the strict binaries of guilt and innocence that frame English jurisprudence. His intervention is a defence of African epistemology — of the right to speak and be heard in one’s own idiom, not through the ventriloquism of colonial reason.
Sikhakhane calls the tribunal’s attention to the structure of isiXhosa itself — a language built on relational cadence, metaphor, and rhythmic provocation. He argues that the courtroom’s inability to interpret Mengo’s and Mbenenge’s exchanges correctly stems from cultural illiteracy. He tells Vetten: “You do not know the idioms of ukuqhasa, ukuphimisa and ukushela for proposing love. You do not hear what is being said — you only translate.”
This dynamic is also evident in a common isiXhosa practice where terms like bhuti (brother) or tata (father) are used fluidly in social and playful interactions, often outside their literal familial meanings. For instance, a young woman might call an older man tata with a tone that is knowingly ironic, teasing, or flirtatious — not to position herself as childlike, but to play with the language of respect in a way that is performative and socially legible. The older man, attuned to the performative context, may respond in kind — exaggerating his seriousness or offering mock wisdom — both participants aware that the exchange is a form of ukudlalisa ngamazwi. Within this practice, power is not imposed but shared through timing, tone, and mutual understanding. Responsibility for the interaction is held by both, and meaning is shaped relationally, not determined by hierarchy. In this same linguistic tradition, flirtation is not anchored to dominance or submission. A younger woman may tease a senior man, and the senior man may perform submission — all within the cultural rhythm of ukudlalisa ngamazwi.
Yet the courtroom translates these idioms through a Western framework that equates hierarchy with coercion and desire with danger. It assumes that power can only travel from the top down. It cannot imagine a scenario where the woman, coded junior, is the one wielding symbolic power, directing the flow of flirtation, and terminating it when it ceases to please her.
This refusal to acknowledge bottom-up power is itself a patriarchal move — ironically reinforced by feminist experts who deny women the right to navigate desire as a living, tactical energy. Mengo’s sexuality is not something done to her. It is something she lives, shapes, and performs. Her eroticism is mobile — it courts, withdraws, dares, and defies. It is untranslatable to the court’s binary logic.
The language of “big girl” and “little girl” seized upon by whiteness in testimony and media coverage infantilises Mengo while demanding that she remain legible to the state. It refuses her womanhood, her contradiction, her desire. It repositions her as the raw material for a state-sponsored morality tale. The courtroom does not want women who defy its codes. It wants confession or silence.
And Mengo confesses nothing.
What this tribunal reveals is that liberal feminist discourse, when weaponised by the state, becomes indistinguishable from the machinery of repression. It polices desire. It enforces intelligibility. It punishes erotic dissent. The courtroom does not want a woman who says, “Surprise me.” It wants one who says, “Save me.”
Yvette Abrahams, in her seminal essay “Ambiguity Is My Middle Name,” reminds us that the sexual expression of African women, historically and now, must be read through their own contexts of power, survival, and subversion. She shows how 17th-century Khoekhoe women weaponised flirtation to challenge colonial masculinity, using their bodies not as objects but as subjects in struggle — teasing, performing, refusing capture by colonial meaning.
Ukudlalisa ngamazwi stands in this same tradition. It is not a deviation from resistance, but one of its most elegant forms. It thrives in uncertainty. It invites surprise. It celebrates a femininity that is irreducible to victimhood. And that is its crime.
The liberal episteme calls this gender justice, but what it veils is a linguistic and cultural purge.
As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o teaches, “The domination of a people’s language by the languages of the colonising nations was central to the domination of the mental universe of the colonised.” The colonial project did not simply suppress African bodies — it attacked African meaning. It severed language from its cultural womb and declared indigenous modes of expression as primitive, opaque, or deviant.
In this view, the courtroom becomes a symbolic site of that ongoing conquest — where meaning must pass through the narrow syntax of English in order to be deemed legitimate. To allow isiXhosa and all the languages of Africa to speak in their full, embodied complexity — without translation, without sanitisation — is to challenge this colonial scaffolding directly. It is to say that justice cannot exist in a language that does not recognise the poetic, metaphorical, and relational ways in which Africans speak themselves into being.
Until such a shift occurs, every courtroom remains a colonial one. And anyone who participates in the cultural practice of ukudlalisa ngamazwi — the shared, reciprocal play of language, teasing, and gesture — risks having their meaning misread, their intentions criminalised. The violence lies not in the act, but in a system that refuses to hear what African tongues are saying — a system deaf to metaphor, rhythm, and relational nuance.
Again, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o reminds us, decolonisation begins with language. To allow isiXhosa — and by extension all the indigenous African languages that live in South Africa — to speak fully, without translation or diminished English interpretations, is to open the law to its own limitations. Until then, every courtroom remains a colonial one. And every woman or man who speaks in their own erotic tongue, and submits to the game, is at risk of being put on trial.
This is not a pronouncement on the guilt or innocence of Judge President Mbenenge or Andiswa Mengo. It is an alternative possibility to the strictures of whiteness epistemology and its interpretations.
Gillian Schutte is a South African writer, published poet, social critic, and activist. For over 28 years, she has been narrating life from within a Xhosa family, drawing from the intimate complexities of interracial kinship, historical trauma, and cultural translation. She is the author of After Just Now, a fabulated memoir that explores the ancestral collision between her Dutch settler lineage and her husband Sipho Singiswa’s amaXhosa heritage, rooted in the 1700s Eastern Cape.
Schutte holds a Master of Arts in Creative Writing and a Bachelor of Arts in African Politics. A fierce critic of whiteness, neoliberalism, and imperialism, she has consistently taken on multinational corporations, liberal media institutions, and elitist gatekeepers who obscure or commodify Black struggle. Her journalism and commentary are uncompromising, intellectually rigorous, and deeply grounded in the lived experiences of the dispossessed.
She is co-founder of Media for Justice, and her work spans literature, political analysis, and documentary filmmaking. As a decolonial thinker and long-time disruptor of liberal pieties, Schutte’s voice remains one of the most unflinching in post-apartheid South Africa.