Racist Video Sparks Condemnation Across South Africa

A dumped girlfriend of one of the four University of Free State students implicated in a racist video, leaked the video recording on Friday showing racist scenes that have sparked condemnation across the country and the world.

The video shows white students humiliating and abusing elderly black workers at the Free State University. It shows white students urinating on food that cleaning staff are given to eat while on their knees.

The University of Free State in the Free State Province is historically a white university that is grappling with integrating black and white students.

The four white students and their lawyers are mounting a counter-attack in the face of looming criminal charges, as the fury over the humiliation of black cleaners mounts across the country.

On Friday, black students staged a protest at the University and went on a rampage and vandalized the University campus.

The cleaners are reportedly receiving counseling and have been ordered not to talk to the media by their trade union- the National Education Health and Allied Workers’ Union (Nehawu) in a bid to protect them.

Two of the students seen in the video have been barred from the campus by the University management. The other two completed their studies last year.

The National Prosecuting Authority has confirmed on Saturday that it was taking the footage very seriously and investigating possible charges of assault and criminal injury.

“On the face of it, the conduct is grossly inhumane and constitutes a gross violation of rights,” NPA spokesperson Tlali Tlali said.

The tension boiled over on campus on Friday when police clashed with black student protesters angered by the video.

This followed several protest marches last week over the university’s newly implemented hostel integration policy.

Speaking after a meeting of her party’s parliamentary caucus on Friday, the leader of the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) Helen Zille condemned the video footage. “That is the tragedy as we are trying to move away from a society built on race categorizations and race group generalizations. This kind of thing drives us right back to those kinds of descriptions,” she said.

She added that South Africa needed to move forward to non-racialism and nation-building and that she was pleased “that everyone is standing up on this issue”.

Zille said the racist video also was “the harshest possible reminder of the aberration that was apartheid, of the insults that people experienced and of the laws that they had to survive to get through every day.

“It is still so close to the surface that when something like this happens, it is like a wound reopened, because many people do not see this as the aberrant behavior of a few individuals, but see it as part of a culture of an institution and even worse associate this kind of behavior with a whole category of people, white South Africans in general and white Afrikaners in particular.”

Source African Press Agency

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