Varsity must deal with racism

FOURTEEN years ago a video of five elderly black employees at the University of the Free State who were made to eat food which had been urinated on shocked South Africa.

At the behest of four white male students at the university’s Reitz Residence, the video sought to de-humanise the workers.

This incident publicly exposed the racism to which many blacks are subjected to at South Africa’s formerly white tertiary institutions, and years later it would be one of the catalysts for the Fallist movement.

Despite this and the supposed victories achieved by the Fallist movement, racism persists on South Africa’s university campuses and those who try to excuse it are coming up with more ways to gaslight us into silence.

A day after the story made headlines, the DA’s Leon Schreiber belatedly released a statement condemning the incident and calling for an investigation to be handled with the “requisite speed, diligence and seriousness”.

Schreiber is the same politician, sitting on the university’s council, who has been waging a campaign to preserve Afrikaans as a language of instruction at the university.

Anyone with more than two brain cells can read the proxy battle over Afrikaans for what it really is: preservation of Stellenbosch University’s white Afrikaner identity. At the other formerly Afrikaans tertiary institutions that battle has long since been lost and people have, mostly, moved on. But in Stellenbosch, opponents of transformation are making a last stand.

When Theuns du Toit decided to urinate on Babalo Ndwayana’s belongings, he did so perhaps because he didn’t consider him an equal.

There’s no doubt that the debates currently ranging at the university, where the DA has sought to draw political capital over Afrikaans, have given impetus to racists.

Knowing that there’s no place for an “Afrikaans-only” public university in a country like South Africa, opponents of transformation are becoming more desperate. That desperation results in the naked racism we witnessed, in a video, captured by Ndwayana.

Whatever happens to Du Toit, we should judge the university for the work they are doing to correct and reverse the legacy of apartheid.