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“I wont have sex with you, go and have sex with your mother,” Abae said before Justice Moses Chinhengo. He said the words offended and angered him to the point of losing composure and hence he assaulted his wife violently and hit her with a moretlwa stick. He said his actions were affected by the fact that both of them had been drinking chibuku beer from morning until late at night when the disagreement erupted.
The incident, according to the charge sheet occurred on August 2002 near Serorome cattlepost in the central district. Abae, a herds- boy from Motsawa ward in Thabala who works in Serorome, pleaded not guilty to the murder charge. He said that his wife had refused to accompany him home after the long chibuku drinking session. “I told her that we should go home and it was when she refused that I pushed her away. I hit her three times with the stick produced here as an exhibit. It is true that I dragged her home and she bit me in the scuffle. By the time I placed her by the moretlwa bush, she was still drunk and conscious,” he said. Around 11pm he left for the cattle post where he resides to get a jacket to cover his wife’s body. She was in the nude after the fight and death. He denied that the death came as a result of the assault.
Earlier, state witnesses, Oeta Kelekabile and Detective Sergeant Alidy Alidy gave evidence led by state counsel Pascal Mhandu. The defence counsel Lyndon Mothusi found Kelekabile’s submission wanting as he had not made reference to the “blood stained shirt” in the statement he made to the police after the day of the incident. Mothusi said the reference to the shirt is a concocted afterthought. He tendered the police statement as evidence of the non-credibility of the witnes’s submission, whom he said, could not be relied on, as his submission was fraught with inconsistencies.
The case continues today.
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