Apartheid University

27.2.08

The administration of the University of the Free State (UFS) in Bloemfontein, South Africa, is working hard to condemn a heinous racist attack by four of its white students on Black staff members.

For those of you who do not know, the UFS is a formerly whites-only Afrikaans medium university that has struggled to integrate its campus.

In the past couple of years the University has allowed white students to maintain whites-only residences (dormitories). This practice still continues.

You read that right. The UFS has whites-only dormitories, inclusive of a mostly white faculty and administration, 14 years after the end of apartheid.

The University once explained whites-only residences as a matter of student choice. They claimed that white students were merely seeking to maintain their cultural heritage and, therefore, it was not really a matter of race exclusion.

Black students disagree. Many of them complain that white students seek to intimidate them and that they are at a disadvantage in classes where white faculty privilege white students.

This week white students rioted on campus to protest integration at UFS. Police were called in and students were arrested.

Now, just days later, a report surfaces that details an incident where white students made a video of Black female employees being humiliated for the purpose of protesting integration.

The Mail & Guardian reports that the "video allegedly depicts a mock integration of five elderly African staff members."

News24 reports that:

"The video shows four white male students taking black, elderly, women workers and making them down a bottle of beer, run a race, play rugby and then kneel and eat meat which had been urinated upon …"

Criminal charges are being brought against these students and the University has condemned this incident "in the strongest possible terms."

Still, this situation is beyond shameful. It speaks to the persistent arrogance of whiteness and its brutal mindset in the post-apartheid era.

The incident is also a failure of governance and political will. The ANC government has not effectively moved to integrate and reorient apartheid era whites-only universities.

Instead, the government has sought to coddle these kinds of institutions. This must change!

And we are not free. Not by far.

Ridwan Laher

***Update(February 27)***

You can see the disgusting video here.



The BBC also has an updated article on the racist attack and some of the early fallout.