By Clare Byrne, DPA
Johannesburg : The jubilant South Africans who stood in long lines to cast their vote in the country’s first democratic elections at the end of apartheid 14 years ago could never have imagined scenes like these. Young white university students forcing poor black workers to kneel on the ground and eat food in which they urinated by way of protest over attempts at racial integration on campus.
While a few souls have been heard to downplay the incident as a prank, most South Africans have reacted with horror to the racist video made by students at the University of the Free State (UFS) mocking Integrasie (integration in Afrikaans) by humiliating black workers.
“They urinate on the Rainbow Nation,” the Citizen newspaper, popular among white readers, said in an editorial, describing the video made by students at the Bloemfontein campus of the UFS as “sick, disgusting, and depraved”.
The footage was proof that “apartheid, especially in the Free State, is still alive and thriving,” the Sowetan newspaper said.
Political parties and civil society groups have also roundly condemned the video, which raises uncomfortable questions about the state of race relations in the Rainbow Nation.
“Although the rest of the world seems to imagine we’re some sort of miracle, a Rainbow Nation, that’s really not the case,” says Theresa Oakley-Smith, an educationist who has spent over a decade working on integration issues.
On a scale of one to 10, with 10 being the most egregious example of the racism still latent in South Africa, “that (the UFS video) is about a nine,” says Oakley-Smith. “But I’ve seen a lot of eights in recent months”.
Yes, blacks and whites are now occupying the same spaces but “there’s hardly any real social interaction between people of different colours,” she notes.
In schools, black children still mostly play with black children and white children with whites.
“Government, business and everybody is not doing nearly enough to bring about a change in attitudes,” she says, calling for the same energy that went into creating highly effective apartheid stereotypes of blacks to be injected into reversing them.
In the ruckus caused by the video some have questioned whether iconic former president Nelson Mandela overstretched the hand of reconciliation.
By throwing everything at the need to “move on” from the past Mandela’s government papered over the need for white South Africans to own up to the wrongs of the past, according to South Africa Human Rights Commission Chairman Jody Kollapen.
Many whites felt that by conceding political power they had “done enough” and that there was no need to go further, like accept black students into previously whites-only hostels, he adds.
“We’re in denial that there’s a problem,” he says also blaming the recourse to the race card by politicians and interest groups for entrenching hardline views.
President Thabo Mbeki regularly dismisses whites who complain about government’s performance as racist while blacks who complain about the slow pace of transformation are sneered at by some whites as wanting to get their hands on whites’ “hard-gotten” gains.
Several incidents have inflamed racial tensions in recent months.
In one of the most serious, a young white man opened fire on black township dwellers in northwest province, killing four people in an apparently unprovoked attack.
In another, white journalists in Johannesburg were excluded from an off-the-record briefing for black journalists with ruling African National Congress president Jacob Zuma on the basis that white and black journalists in South Africa had diverging interests.
“If you just put people together without education, if you force them together, it just entrenches racism,” says Oakley-Smith. “We also need a strategy to help us understand each other.”