The case continued to inflame passions even after Masipa delivered her decision.
“We are here in support of all women who have been abused or killed by their partners,” said supermarket worker Joyce Radebe, who took the day off to demonstrate outside the court with members of the Women’s League of the ruling African National Congress.
Theatrical prosecutor Nel, who had painted Pistorius as a gun-obsessed hot-head who whooped with joy when he blew apart a water-melon with a high-calibre pistol, was forced to watch as Masipa zeroed in on the few hard facts, brushing aside his courtroom antics and attempts to discredit the athlete.
However, the prosecution’s case forced democratic, post-apartheid South Africa – glued to the live television feed – to ask itself some uncomfortable questions.
Foremost among them were queries about male attitudes to weapons and violence and the reality of whites and blacks still inhabiting largely different worlds two decades after the end of white-minority rule.
Why, commentators asked, of more than 30 witnesses called were only two – a security guard and police ballistics expert – black?
Why, Masipa aside, were nearly all the leading protagonists white in a nation where whites are just 10 percent of the population?
Would a much-maligned justice system stand up to scrutiny against a top-notch and well-funded defense team?
And, as backdrop to it all, the universal white suburban fear: how to protect yourself from an intruder – assumed to be black – in the middle of the night, a fear hardwired by years of apartheid propaganda about the ‘swart gevaar’, Afrikaans for ‘black danger’.
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