NEWSLETTER | ISSUE 5 | ISLA CONVERSATIONS
Sexual Harassment – Race and Gender in the Mbenenge Tribunal
May 2026
By Sibusisiwe Ndlela
The weaponization of the so-called defence of culture by Black men against Black women is not novel. Clarence Thomas, Jacob Zuma, and now Selby Mbenenge. In the most recent instalment of the ISLA Conversations, we explored the Judicial Conduct Tribunal’s (a quasi-judicial body to investigate Judges’ misconduct) investigation into the allegations of sexual harassment against Judge Selby Mbenege, the Judge President of the Eastern Cape Division of the High Court.
The Mbenenge Tribunal presented an opportunity to engage with the reality that sexual harassment continues to be a threat to the right of women to exist in the workplace.
At the centre of this case is the complainant, Ms. Andiswa Mengo, a Black woman who is a Judge’s secretary in the same court. She alleges that Judge Mbenenge subjected her to persistent, unwanted sexual advances through explicit WhatsApp messages over a period of more than a year. The Judge President denies harassment, arguing that their exchanges were consensual and culturally appropriate.
But the most disturbing part of the Tribunal and the public commentary surrounding it has been the mobilisation of race and gender, culture, and respectability to diminish her account and insulate his. The ISLA Conversation on this Tribunal laid bare why this is not merely a misconduct inquiry into the individual Judge’s behaviour, but that is also a display of whose voices matter in South Africa’s legal system and the public discourse.
In this Conversation, Nicolette Naylor, Founder of the Ubuntu Global Philanthropy & Gender Justice Consulting, reminded us of how South African law defines sexual harassment as unwanted conduct of a sexual nature. The anti-discrimination framework then anchors this firmly within structural inequality, and not just isolated individual misconduct. When a senior Judge engages a junior employee, the power imbalance is not incidental, it is determinative.
Although this is a factual inquiry into what happened and a determination of the merits. The Tribunal’s discourse has disproportionately drifted toward scrutinising her behaviour, her responses, her ambition, and even her WhatsApp etiquette rather than his conduct in the context of the circumstances. This is a classic gendered reversal. The inquiry’s purpose is to assess whether he breached constitutional, labour, and ethical standards. Instead, her credibility has become the battleground.
When harassment occurs, they are not just Black women confronting sexism, nor just Black people confronting racism, they are navigating a compounded form of vulnerability that the law has yet to meaningfully address.
In the Mbenenge Tribunal and the public discourse around it, the intersectionality of race and gender were surfaced in two ways. First, race was weaponized against the complainant, with public commentary suggesting a conspiracy to topple a respected Black man. This racialized framing is also situated in the broader context of post-colonial and post-Apartheid South African society. Second, culture was invoked as a defence, reframing the alleged conduct as culturally normative and therefore not amounting to sexual harassment. This framing exists in the broader context of the predominance of Western culture. In the intersection of both race and gender, this is a shield that is uniquely employed by Black men against Black women.
This cultural “trump card” is not new. Dr. Nompumelelo Motlafi-Francis, a Postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation at the University of Johannesburg, demonstrated that culture has long been used to undermine Black women’s claims by painting them as culturally naïve or as misinterpreting Black men’s intentions. This is compounded by the lack of a Black woman expert in the Tribunal to provide cultural context on what is considered normative in intra-race relations. The irony is stark: Black women’s own cultural perspectives were never given attention in this Tribunal. She also surfaces how the resort to or choice of expert, in the form of Dr. Lisa Vetten a renown gender-based violence expert who is a White woman, is a product and continuation of racial hierarchies of who is considered an expert in a court of law.
Zethu Albanie, a PhD (Sociology) Candidate at the University of Cape Town, remarked how Judge Mbenenge’s public standing (which include his jurisprudence, charisma, and carefully crafted moral persona) have been repeatedly invoked to suggest that sexual harassment is simply out of character. This is textbook respectability politics: powerful men are presumed ethical, while Black women who speak out are presumed vindictive. This credibility economy is racialized. He possesses “surplus credibility”; she carries “deficit credibility.” His reputation functions as a shield; her testimony is treated with inherent suspicion.
Another insidious aspect of the Tribunal is what is described as “intellectualised misogyny”. We see it in arguments that “no means no” is Eurocentric.
We see it in claims that women weaponize harassment to destroy successful men. We see it in commentary that casts him as a victim of feminist overreach, and her as a threat to Black men’s authority. This is misogyny dressed up in cultural critique, legal sophistication, and decolonial vocabulary, but it is misogyny, nonetheless.
This case is not about one Judge or one complainant. It is about whether Black women can seek justice in institutions that were never designed with their safety or credibility in mind.
As we await the Tribunal’s findings, one thing is clear: believing Black women is not only an ethical imperative, but also a constitutional one. And until our legal system recognizes the intersectional nature of the harm they face, justice will remain partial, delayed, and structurally denied.