Too Much Coffee ? » Blog Archive » Free State University Racist Video

The narration on the video begins: "Once upon a time the `boere' lived peacefully here on Reitz Island, until one day when the less-advantaged discovered the word `integration' in the dictionary."

The cleaners take part in a "boat race" (a beer-downing competition), a dance, a sprint race, a mock rugby practice and finally, they're given a mixture to drink.

The video shows garlic being put into a dish full of what looks like dog food.

"We know they're less privileged so we're adding a bit of meat," says the narrator.

Another student puts the bowl on the toilet and urinates into the mixture.

The brew is then distributed in plastic glasses to the cleaners.

All five of them spit out the first mouthful, but try to finish it amid loud encouragement from the students.

The video ends with the words: "That, at the end of the day, is what we think of integration."

This is followed by one of the students asking a cleaner: "What does 'sefebe' mean in Afrikaans?"

"A black whore," she replies.

This, a mere month after a racist shooting where an 18 years old white kid went on a killing spree, is the so maniest sign on the wall how entrenched racism remains under the white, Afrikaans population.

The FSU is situated in Bloemfontein. This is at the very heart of what was historically, Orange Free State, one of the two Boer states and it should not be dismissed as just history. Although it's impossible these days to find out by the numbers, because everyone will say straight-faced that racism is bad, Free State remains a bulwark of apartheid thinking, of which the existence of the "whites only" Orania enclave is perhaps the most exemplary.

Of course the FSU responded the only way it could: condemnation of the video, criminal charges against the students involved and the obligatory damage control. The Human Rights Commission and Ministry of Education are now on the case as well.

Two of the four students involved have already left the university, having graduated past December. The other two have been expelled, pending further charges, and are now making preposterous claims that no urine ever was involved (as if that would make it all right?). They also expressed "sorrow" in their own petty way:

Free State Four: We didn't urinate on meat : Mail & Guardian Online

RC Malherbe and Schalk van der Merwe said they acted without malicious intent, and expressed sorrow for the embarrassment they might have caused any individual or group, including their parents.

"Messrs Malherbe and Van der Merwe ... participated in the making of the film but remind their critics that they were and are students," said a statement released by their lawyer in Bloemfontein.

The situation at FSU is altogether illustrative how integration at a number of university campuses has been successfully sabotaged over the past years, in direct response of policy outlined to enforce integration of student residencies. The residency in which this video was taped, the Reitz residency, apparently has a long tradition refusing to accommodate black students and harbouring all the trademarks of apartheid superiority thinking.

The Free State Four and the FF+ factor : Mail & Guardian Online

Students interviewed this week confirmed its reputation. One said it had become a home for disgruntled right-wing students during the mid-Nineties.

Another former student said Reitz had been home to "troublemakers".

Fourth-year UFS student Tumelo Thamae said black students feared walking past residences such as Reitz and Karee "because the likelihood of being verbally or physically abused is high".

As Mail & Guardian reporters Monako Dibetle and Oupa Nkosi were about to interview students at Reitz during a visit to the campus this week, a white security guard asked them to leave.

The Student's Representative Council (SRC) is dominated and controlled at the FSU by youth members of the most rabid of all political parties in this country: Freedom Front Plus (they don't get a link from me). A party which has been making headway on several campuses and which is stridently against student integration, yet claiming it is not racist.

Despite protestations of the FF+ to the contrary, the weekly newspaper Mail and Guardian came this Saturday with the damning scoop on the involvement of the FF+ and their role on setting the climate of dissent and racism.

The Free State Four and the FF+ factor : Mail & Guardian Online

The M&G has established that the FF+ and its youth wing have been actively targeting the campuses of historically white institutions such as the UFS and the University of Pretoria, to campaign against racial integration.

At the UFS this has been done since the Nineties through a cultural organisation promoting Afrikaner interests. The male club is known as Here XVII (Lords Seventeen, which refers to the Dutch East India Company's bosses, who drove colonialism in the 17th century) and has been "owned" by the FF+.

The party controls the SRCs at both the Free State and Pretoria campuses and this week announced it was registering a student organisation at the University of Stellenbosch.

"The Freedom Front Plus youth at Maties will focus on the protection of Afrikaans on campus, preserve Christian values and guarantee that high standards are maintained and not replaced by transformation," said James Kemp, FF+ member in the Western Cape, in a statement on the party's website.

The situation on campus has been getting more grim and tensions are building. It doesn't help that the Reitz residents are not showing signs of remorse.

Race row students are unrepentant : Mail & Guardian Online

On the segregated campus of South Africa's University of the Free State this weekend, tensions were thunderously high as black students planned a mass protest for Monday against the white students who made a video humiliating their black cleaners.

snip snip

An elderly black car park attendant, who identified himself only as Michael, said: "There is going to be fighting. The blacks are going to get their revenge for those ladies. We've had many race riots here, and now there will be more. The Free State is the mother of apartheid."

But Reitz residence head Christo Dippenaar denied the 120-bed hostel was a hotbed of racism resisting the university's integration moves. "If you are going to put white and black together, there will be tension. There has to be something to bind them and we believe the link is rugby. Reitz has been a finalist or winner of the National Residences Competition for the past 12 years. So we told the authorities that we want to select our black residents. They refused, though out of the eight black residents they sent us, four play rugby."

The attitude of South Africa on racism is, to my eyes, just peculiar. The country is hypersensitive to any form of it, the outrage is complete and at all levels, an investigation is launched, some retaliating steps are taken... and then nothing much. The beat goes on. Nothing really changes, until the next outrage. It's a damning picture of a group of people who are incapable to embrace change and transformation.

Zapiro, of course.