A South African Campus Wrestles With the Legacy of Apartheid

[Harold F. Schiffman]

 http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/03/2150n.htm

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 firsthand, 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
cleanersfour women and a manare 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 prosecution. 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 policywhich he says
tries to force integration on residences without giving students enough of
a say about how it is achievedand 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 residenceswhere around
3,000 of the university's 25,000 students livewhich are steeped in such
traditions as the initiation rites lampooned in the video.

After early efforts at integration in the residences 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 a 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," Mr. Wessels says. "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."

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, Tokelo Fako, third-year marketing student, 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 tabletop 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.

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