Tuesday, March 18, 2008

A South African Campus Wrestles With the Legacy of Apartheid
By MEGAN LINDOW

Bloemfontein, South Africa

It was all just a "harmless" prank, never intended to hurt anyone, the students say.

Sitting around a table on the lawn of Reitz Hall, their residence complex on the campus of the University of the Free State, Willie Struwig and Jan Botha, both third-year students, try to explain their bewilderment at the waves of outrage that have swept this campus lately, ever since video footage of white students humiliating the hall's black cleaning staff found its way from the privacy of their dormitory to the Web.

Released on campus late last month, the video shows five elderly black domestic workers on their knees, being taunted by white male students to drink a stew that one of the young men had allegedly urinated into (The Chronicle, February 28).

The episode has thrown this historically white Afrikaans university—now struggling with racial transformation—into turmoil. It has also, educators say, exposed deeper undercurrents of racial animosity that persist on this and other campuses around the country after 14 years of democracy in South Africa, particularly among young white Afrikaans men who feel they face a bleak future under black majority rule.

The video, made by four white students in protest against a new university policy requiring the racial integration of campus housing, was shown last September at a "cultural evening" in Reitz Hall, their exclusively white-male residence.

Mr. Botha, a psychology major, remembers watching the video during the cultural evening, where it was voted the most popular entry by the residents, and finding it funny. "It wasn't a racially motivated video," he says. "It was a comedy."

Then, recently, somebody leaked it out over the campus e-mail network, where it was quickly picked up by the local and foreign media. The callous racism shown by a group of Afrikaners who were too young to have ever experienced the cruelties of apartheid first-hand, yet were unsettlingly echoing the old racist attitudes of previous generations, was furiously condemned around the world.

"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 narration begins.

Mockingly portrayed as new "initiates" into Reitz Hall, the five cleaners—four women and a man—are filmed running a race, downing beers, and playing rugby. But the clincher comes toward the end, as the students prepare a concoction of what looks like dog food mixed with garlic.

Then a young man clad in a baseball cap is shown placing the mixture on top of a toilet. Standing with his back to the camera, he appears to urinate into the mixture.

In the next scene, the concoction is served to the five unsuspecting workers, who are kneeling on the ground. Tasting the mixture, they start gagging and spitting it out while the boys laugh, telling them in Afrikaans to finish it.

Bitter Divisions
Since the video's release, two of the students have been suspended and barred from the campus. The other two had graduated at the end of last year, but all four now face criminal prosecutions. The university is also considering whether to close down Reitz Hall, a residence that many students and staff members say is a breeding ground for racism on campus.

Christo Dippenaar, the head of Reitz Hall, says that the video was intended merely to poke fun at the new integration policy–which he says tries to force integration on residences without giving students enough of a say about how it is achieved–and that the cleaners were fully informed of its purpose and readily agreed to take part in it. And the student was only pretending to urinate on the food, he adds.

According to Mogate Mphahlele, the branch secretary of the workers' union on campus, however, the cleaners are deeply traumatized and humiliated by the incident and feel that the students violated their trust. "What angers us most is that this incident has been taken seriously throughout the world, and [the students] say that it was not a serious thing," he says. "They are arrogant. It means to them that if you are playing with a black person's feelings, it's OK."

Meanwhile for a university that has struggled over the past two decades to transform itself from a deeply conservative bastion of Afrikaans culture into a diverse institution where all races and cultures feel at home, the incident has proved bitterly divisive. While the government last year slammed the University of the Free State, saying that it could no longer continue to "justify its existence as an untransformed island," administrators here say they have worked hard to improve race relations in this conservative Afrikaans heartland.

"Had it not been for this video, I would have thought we were doing well," says Ezekiel Moraka, the vice rector for student affairs on campus, who is in charge of the integration of the residence halls.

Indeed, the university has made great strides toward racial diversity in recent years. Founded in the early 1900s, shortly after the Afrikaans heartland of the Orange Free State lost its independence to the British in the Anglo-Boer War, it initially served a humiliated and impoverished population hungry for advancement through higher education.

The first black undergraduate was admitted only in 1988. But since then, the university has transformed at a rapid pace and now has a student body that is more than 60 percent black.

If the campus is diverse, however, it is far from integrated. A system of dual-language instruction, introduced to accommodate speakers of both Afrikaans and English, has resulted in largely segregated classrooms, with the majority of white students opting for classes in Afrikaans while most black students attend classes in English. Racial tolerance has been particularly slow to seep into the cultures of the residences—where around 3,000 of the university's 25,000 students live—which are steeped in such traditions as the initiation rites lampooned in the video.

After early efforts at integration in the hostels turned violent in the late 1990s, administrators backed off, allowing students to decide for themselves where they would stay. As an unintended consequence, they acknowledge, the residences are now more racially exclusive than ever, with students basically self-segregating into black and white residence halls.

To remedy the situation, the university began enforcing a new racial quota system for residence halls at the beginning of the academic year, in February. But students say that whites assigned to live in "black" dormitories have simply moved out of them, while blacks placed in "white" dormitories have been taunted and victimized by their white peers.

The Mail & Guardian, a South African newspaper, reported that it had received copies of letters from black students in white residences complaining to management of being insulted, assaulted, and forced to make Nazi salutes during their initiations into the dorms.

"The white people just don't like blacks, period," says third-year student Masello Khabutlane, as her friend Rethabile Manyedi nods in agreement.

"When you're alone and you see a group of white guys, you are so nervous. We're not even comfortable in our own varsity," says Ms. Manyedi, using the common term for university here. "We had hoped that integration would help, but it has just made it worse."

The two women, along with other black students, complain that the residents of Reitz and other white-male dormitories will shout racial epithets at them and sometimes throw tomatoes or turn a hose on them as they walk past.

A Blind Eye
Students, academics, and politicians alike have all slammed the university for turning a blind eye to signs of racism that have been there all along. "For every extreme action you see, you have a lot of people who are racist but don't go as far. They create the context for these kinds of things to happen," says Christi van der Westhuizen, a political analyst and author of a book called White Power and the Rise and Fall of the National Party (Zebra Press, 2007). "It's a manifestation of a mind-set that is widespread."

She and others highlight the role of right-wing Afrikaans political groups on campus for stirring up opposition to racial integration and creating a feeling of polarization among students. The Freedom Front Plus, a right-wing Afrikaans party, has been stepping up its presence at historically Afrikaans universities, arguing vociferously that "forced integration" on campuses is threatening Afrikaans interests, says Ms. van der Westhuizen.

Scarcely visible on campuses a few years back, the party now dominates student government here as well as at the University of Pretoria, another historically Afrikaans institution. The party also announced recently that it would establish a presence at the University of Stellenbosch, which is seen as a flagship Afrikaans institution, and where a fierce debate over the status of Afrikaans as the primary teaching language has raged for years.

Just the week before the video was released, white students waving placards of the Freedom Front Plus marched on campus, protesting the new policy of "forced" integration in the residence halls. The party is committed to preserving the Afrikaans language, Christianity, and "high standards" on historically Afrikaans campuses, says Wouter Wessels, a fifth-year student who heads up the Freedom Front on campus.

Universities have an important role to play in preserving Afrikaans culture, which is now under threat, he argues. "We as Afrikaner youth had nothing to do with apartheid. But we are now in a situation in 2008 where a white person, an Afrikaans person, can't get a job because of skin color," says Mr. Wessels.

Back at Reitz Hall, Mr. Struwig and Mr. Botha share similar views, saying that "forced integration" of their dormitory is jeopardizing their identity as an Afrikaans-speaking, Christian community that is passionate about rugby. "We are more than happy to accommodate blacks here, but let us do it on our own terms," says Mr. Struwig.

At the predominantly black residence hall next door, called Villa Bravado, however, third-year marketing student Tokelo Fako shakes his head in exasperation. "This is 2008," he says. "How can we still be talking about forced integration? Integration should be normal by now."

This is the cruel irony that the video episode has exposed, says Dap Louw, who heads the psychology department at the university. In his hands, Mr. Louw holds the broken pieces of a wooden sculpture of an African woman kneeling as she clasps a pot. A couple of weeks ago, white students protesting against integration threw a brick through his window, smashing the sculpture from the table top where he had displayed it.

"During the apartheid years, I said to people that one of the most tragic results of apartheid will be that whites will not realize what impact the system is going to have on their own children once apartheid is gone," says Mr. Louw, who says he wept out of "disappointment" when he saw the video.

"Those children are victims of apartheid still," he says, referring to the makers of the video.

Ras Marcus writes: Africa and Africans will not have peace until we establsh black solidarity and get rid of white people out of Mama Africa. They just think that they should be in charge of everything, even when they are strangers in other people's own Country.
Again I send many oceans of blessings and self determination to African people everywhere
ONE BLACK HEART ONE BLACK LOVE
Baba Ras Marcus