A Joke About Rape

I’m attending UNISWA’s first annual Law Week. I enter the hall and, because I’m white and severely underdressed, people assume I’m some sort of honored guest and attempt to seat me at the high table. It takes me a while to explain, “I’m nobody.” I attempt to be discreet and take a seat in the back. While we wait for the distinguished guests to appear (already they are more than an hour late by the time table I received) some photographers roam through the students and punctual guests taking photos on sophisticated DSLR cameras. A camera man comes up to me as I’m concentrating on my SuDuKo. I am tired and looking like crap from driving all over Swaziland on a hot day in a car with no air-conditioning. He sticks the huge lens in my face and I look up surprised.

“I really don’t want you to take my photo,” I say, scowling.

*Click*

I now noticed that periodically they take the memory card to the computer which is projecting a HUGE image onto the wall above the speaker’s platform. He sinks the photos and then displays them right then and there on this HUGE wall above the speaker’s platform. Everyone is looking at the photos, firstly because they are HUGE, secondly because they are right in front of everyone and thirdly because there’s nothing else to do at the moment. Just as the speeches begin on the platform I notice a GIANT figure of me, scowling, horribly underdressed and chewing on my pen. My head is the size of my dinning room table and my scowl is as large as my arms’ length. It is mortifying.

After speeches by the Presidents of the National and University’s Law Societies, the local Member of Parliament and various school officials (all of the welcoming variety) we now have a break for a performance by a local opera singer – which, in fact, has been the most enjoyable part of the event so far. After the operetta concludes the MC takes the stage to loosen up the crowd for the next speaker by telling the following joke:

A woman was accusing a man of raping her. The victim points to the man in court and proclaims, “This man raped me last Friday night.”

“It was not me,” exclaims the man in an attempt to defend himself.

“But it was,” insists the woman.

This goes on, back and forth as no one can provide evidence or alibi to move the case along. Finally the defendant tries a new course.

“Alright,” concedes the man, “I did indeed rape a woman last Friday night. But I am not so sure it was this woman here who is accusing me. You see,” continued the man, “The woman I raped that night passed gas – that is to say farted – during intercourse. Could that be this woman.”

The woman leaps up shouting, “Ah that was not me, that was not me.” And the man was acquitted.

The audience burst into laughter and the speaker on Human Rights and the Law took the stage. He opened with the question “Do Gays have rights?”