RACISM IS ALIVE AND WELL IN SOUTH AFRICA - the University of the Freestate racist incident

This week, once more, the world witnessed the intensity of the racial divide that is largely just below the surface in South Africa. From time to time, this divide surfaces like the leviathan of yore and rears its most ugly head for all to see. Interesting, too, are the responses to this incident in the South African media. Reading about this online, I decided to add my own perspective as white, Afrikaner male. I noticed that as I read about the incident and as I contemplated the value of responding to it on this blog that, more than usual, I had experienced a pronounced resonance with the matter. It seemed inevitable that I would comment.

The Sowetan reported on 29 February, 2008 [http://www.sowetan.co.za/News/Article.aspx?id=716810] that the video that was made by white, male, Afrikaner students featured "...black employees at the university [UFS] on their knees, eating food that had been urinated on by white students" and that this video "sparked outrage across the political spectrum". In the same newspaper, on the same day, Eric Naki added that the video showed "white students" who were "forcing black cleaning staff to eat food they had urinated on". In response, the Minister of Education, Naledi Pandor "has instructed department head Duncan Hindle to immediately lead a departmental investigation to UFS to meet its leadership to determine what is needed to fight racism at the campus". It appears that the person who published the video was a jilted girlfriend of one of the accused [http://www.sowetan.co.za/News/Article.aspx?id=716733].

On 28 February, 2008, the Sowetan also published an article titled "UFS students say sorry for video". The two accused, Roelof Malherbe and Schalk van der Merwe said that they "acted without malicious intent". They also expressed their "sorrow for the embarrassment they might have caused to any individual or group, including their parents". The article also points out that the two accused remind their critics "that they were and are only students".

OK, what nonsense is this? What defense is: "Hey, we are only mischievous students with no malicious racist intent"? Shall we remind ourselves who these students were and where they resided? Firstly, the students [Roelof Malherbe, Schalk van der Merwe, Johnny Roberts, and Danie Grobler] are white, Afrikaner males. Secondly, in an article in The Star of 29 February, 2008, entitled "We're receiving death threats - students", it is reported that these 4 Afrikaner boys lived in the Reitz Hostel of the University of the Free State. The article points out that: "The residence was started 12 years ago by white students angered at being forced to share a hostel with blacks during the university's first attempt at integration...Left unchecked, Reitz quickly developed a reputation as a hotbed of racism, associated with drunken behaviour. The area in front of the hostel was an offical no-go zone for black students. If they went near it, said former black students, they were on the receiving end of a barrage of racist verbal abuse. The local campus newspaper reported racist incidents involving Reitz residents on numerous occasions. In one, a black female student was attacked." What was that again about these white students having no "malicious intent" and that they were only "students"? The very reason-for-being of the hostel they were living in was a racist statement that expressed the laager-mentality of many retreatist Afrikaners at the time of national liberation in 1994 and shortly thereafter. And they want us to believe that there was no harm intended? That they were only innocent students doing what well-meaning students do - producing an offensive racist video? Of course, van der Merwe and Malherbe decry the unwarranted attention that they got from the media. They bemoan the fact that "the media and the public had crucified them as racists following the publication of the video" [http://www.sowetan.co.za/News/Article.aspx?id=716733]. In defense, they pointed out that the video was a "satirical comment on a topic which was then prevalent and controversial". I just don't get this one at all. A simple definition of satire is that it is a "literary work in which human vice or folly is attacked through irony, derision, or wit" and that it includes "irony, sarcasm, or caustic wit used to attack or expose folly, vice, or stupidity" [http://education.yahoo.com/reference/dictionary/entry/satire]. Are these students suggesting to us that the video was meant as an attack on racism perpetrated by whites and that it was supposed to be an exposition of the folly, vice and stupidity that underlies such racism? And all the while bearing in mind that the very students who supposedly make these noble sociopolitical statements are residents of a university hostel whose very existence is a statement to the contrary? In a statement released by van der Merwe and Malherbe they further point out that the black staff who are freatured in the video are their "loyal friends", they participated "voluntarily" in the video and that they "even enjoyed it". They added that "they were not racists and had no intention of humiliating or degrading the employees or black people in general" [http://www.sowetan.co.za/News/Article.aspx?id=716733]. Is this the kind of "satire" that "loyal friends" would willingly submit to? Is this the kind of sociopolitcal statement that exposes the folly and stupidity of racism? What credibility is there in any such claim when the producers of such a video reside in a hostel that exists purely for the sake of preserving a racially exclusive haven for white students? I buy none of their excuses, I am not sorry to say.

Then, there is the charming defense of the Head Student of the Reitz Hostel, Pieter Odendaal, when he agonised over the response of what I assume to be black students on campus: "They said they will rape our girlfriends and our sisters and they will not stop before the hostel closes, is set on fire or when they see a Reitz student lying in his own pool of blood". As alarming and reprehensible as such statements may be, it hardly comes as a surprise to me that these students would now want to point the finger at others and by so doing deflect attention away from the real issue. Odendaal also cries about the negative impact of the emotional tensions on the academic efforts of Reitz residents.

The lawyer who represents the black university employees who are seen in the video, Lesley Makgoro, pointed out that the staff were not aware of the purpose of the video and that "with deft editing, the video was a protest at integration, ridiculing the very women who would often 'rescue' a drunken Reitz resident from the garden where he had passed out" [http://www.thestar.co.za/?fSectionId=&fArticleId=vn20080229112636379C778528]. One of the black employees remarked: "It has affected us badly. We trusted the students and they betrayed us". Another said: "I'm very hurt. We treated them like our children". It is clear to me that these students are the ones who were having the fun at the cost of the black employees. Their motives for producing the video are indisputably racist. Their defense and mock-surprise at the consequences are entirely incredulous. There is no justification for indulging in this kind of supposed innocent student fun in a country that had witnessed so much pain, devastation and bloodshed in the name of a racist political ideology that has rightly been called a sin against humankind. Is Afrikaner racism alive and well? Yes! Yes! Yes!