The ‘I am’ campaign by students goes viral
THE #IAmStellenbosch campaign, which has caused a stir on social media, has been met with harsh criticism and has been countered with the twitter hashtag #IAmNotStellenbosch.
The campaign was launched this month and, according to its vision and mission statement, wants to “create an awareness of thousands of individual identities that are housed in this university and bring them together into a single identity that is Stellenbosch University”.
It said the increase in student movements at Stellenbosch University and on other campuses had “come at great cost paid for by the morality” of students and university management.
The campaign’s mission includes creating a platform of communication in which students listen to each other through discourse as well as a platform for “understanding, recognition, acknowledgement of differences and an advancement of the Stellenbosch University identity”.
Last week it shared a series of pictures on social media of individual students, holding up a white board, on which they had written a statement starting with the words “I am…”
The statements included: “I am a white Afrikaner and I can’t play rugby” and “I am non-white and prefer my classes in Afrikaans”.
A video titled I AM STELLENBOSCH was also posted on YouTube and by yesterday had been viewed nearly 2 500 times.
The campaign drew a number of responses, many of them negative, on Twitter and Facebook, including: “#iamstellenbosch just proves that they haven’t even begun to #Luister” and “#Iamstellenbosch is what happens when white people lead conversation on transformation. Mess!”
On Friday the opposing #IAmNotStellenbosch campaign responded with a gathering at the university’s Rooiplein.
The students also wrote statements on boards, many of which were posted on Twitter, including: “I was lied to about the language of tuition before coming here” and “I refuse to be tokenised”.
The latest development follows weeks after the Luister video by Open Stellenbosch and Contraband Cape Town went viral.
It features a number of students who “offered their testimony of their lived experiences of the culture of racism and violence which continues 21 years into South Africa’s democracy”.
At a recent meeting of Parliament’s portfolio committee on higher education, the management of the university assured the committee of its commitment to transformation.