When those entrusted with justice indulge in the language of patriarchy, they betray both law and conscience.
There are moments when disappointment cuts deeper than outrage, when those we regard as the stewards of justice, intellect and moral clarity reveal how comfortably they still inhabit the language of patriarchy.
Such a moment came, when retired Judge Bernard Ngoepe compared “women’s power” to a key for a Mercedes-Benz and Donald Trump, and Advocate Muzi Sikhakhane dismissed gender-based violence (GBV) arguments as filtered through “feminist, Western, culturally superior, subjective high-horse” thinking.
These are not harmless musings. They expose the fault lines in how power and gender are still imagined within South Africa’s most elite institutions, the judiciary and the Bar, where the language of justice is often polished but its imagination remains profoundly patriarchal.
The poverty of the Mercedes analogy
Judge Ngoepe’s comparison of women’s power to a Mercedes key is not just distasteful; it is conceptually hollow. A key opens a door; it does not command direction. The metaphor strips women of agency, reducing power to access rather than authorship.
By invoking a Mercedes-Benz, the ultimate status symbol of masculine aspiration, Ngoepe places women’s empowerment squarely within a material, male-defined frame: power as privilege, not purpose. When the judiciary flirts with such metaphors, it tells us something chilling: even those who interpret equality before the law can still fail to imagine equality in life.
The colonial fallacy of calling feminism ‘Western’
If Ngoepe’s words trivialised, Sikhakhane’s remarks delegitimised. By accusing the complainant’s counsel of viewing gender-based violence through a “feminist, Western, culturally superior” lens, he re-centred patriarchy behind a veil of cultural nationalism.
This is an old trick of power: to call equality “foreign” whenever it threatens established hierarchies. It is the same logic used to dismiss human rights as “Eurocentric” while continuing to enjoy their protections.
But gender justice is not a Western project; it is a human one. African women have long theorised and fought patriarchy in their own languages and traditions — from Charlotte Maxeke to Pumla Dineo Gqola and Nomboniso Gasa. To call their struggle “Western” is to erase Africa’s own intellectual and moral agency.
When Sikhakhane speaks of “Xhosa norms and traditions”, one must ask: Whose traditions, and interpreted by whom? Culture is not static; it is a living negotiation of values. To invoke “tradition” against feminism is to fossilise culture at its most convenient point for male authority. Ubuntu itself, our moral North Star, insists that dignity is reciprocal. Violence against women, whether physical or rhetorical, annihilates that dignity.
What could be more un-African than that?
When legal minds lose their moral compass
The judiciary and the legal profession carry immense cultural power. Judges and advocates are not only interpreters of law, they are custodians of the nation’s moral vocabulary. When they resort to chauvinistic metaphors or cultural relativism to explain away misogyny, they do more than offend; they legitimise inequality.
Our Constitution enshrines dignity and equality not as imported ideals, but as the fruits of our own liberation. To treat feminism as foreign and women’s power as ornamental is to betray the spirit of that Constitution, the same one these men once vowed to uphold.
Power reimagined
Women’s power is not a key to someone else’s car. It is the act of building the engine, charting the route and deciding the destination. It is the power that has led families, movements and nations, often without the luxury of a Mercedes.
As Catharine MacKinnon wrote: “The law sees and treats women the way men see and treat women.” The metaphors chosen by our legal minds are mirrors of that truth. If they cannot imagine women as drivers of power, it is not because women lack it. It is because the men describing them still refuse to see it.
The key we hold
The true key to transformation lies not in luxury metaphors or defensive appeals to culture, but in the courage to call out patriarchal thinking wherever it resides. Even in the polished language of the Bench. Feminism is not Western. Equality is not imported.
What is foreign is the continued tolerance for misogyny wrapped in eloquence.
If Judge Ngoepe and Advocate Sikhakhane are listening, let it be said without rancour but with conviction: women’s power is neither borrowed nor bestowed. It is African, ancestral, and enduring; a quiet force that keeps our democracy alive. DM