South Africa
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"Racist YouTube Video That Shamed South Africa"
Another article I took the liberty of copying from the archives of the Angel of Death ...
Racist YouTube Video That Shamed South Africa
[YOUTUBE]e8N-h8anSuE[/YOUTUBE]
Shoulder to shoulder, the Afrikaner teenagers sing as one. Tears well up in their eyes as their right hands clutch their chests. “On a mountain in the night we lie in the darkness and wait,” they boom. “In the mud and blood I lie cold, grain bag and rain cling to me. And my house and my farm burned to ashes, so that they could catch us. But those flames and that fire burn now deep, deep within me. De la Rey, De la Rey. Will you come to lead the Boers?”
On the long wooden tables in front of the boys are the remnants of lunch. Bobotie, a local dish of baked mince and egg; fragrant yellow rice; milk tart. The ritual university meal ends with a tolling bell, a short prayer and the scraping of a hundred chairs on parquet floor as the students head to their afternoon classes.
In silence, the elderly black cleaners — known on campus as “squeezas” — move in and fill the empty common room. The faces of other young men, graduates from the past century, stare down at them. Sharp blond side partings, wireframe glasses, cold green eyes. Masters of a former universe. The architects and enforcers of apartheid.
Clutching her mop and standing in a pool of dirty water, Laukaziemma Koko stands apart. For most of her life she lived in the shadows, avoiding the eyes of the overconfident students. She was invisible — at least until January 2008, when she found herself at the epicentre of the biggest race scandal to hit South Africa in a decade.
The scandal now seems likely to end up in the courts later this month. If they face the judge, Koko and four of her colleagues will testify that they were exploited and humiliated in a shocking video, intended by a group of white students as a crude protest against integration on campus at the prestigious University of the Free State in Bloemfontein. At the time, the 10-minute movie prompted over a million downloads, causing riots on campus and in black townships across South Africa. Apartheid’s old wounds had reopened, 15 years after its abolition.
In the video, four students then living in all-white student hostels and all from remote rural communities, addressed the camera in Afrikaans and announced the mock “integration” of five black cleaners into Reitz hostel, the most infamous of the white residences on the campus. “Once upon a time,’’ one student says in the opening frames, “the Boers had fun living on Reitz Island, up until a day when the previously disadvantaged found the word ‘integration’ in the dictionary.’’ With casual cruelty, the young men then announced a series of traditional hostel initiation tests to the camera to see if the “squeezas” — the women and men who cleaned their rooms every day — were worthy of sharing their all-white “rez”.
The video continues with a drinking contest as the teenagers goad the workers to knock back bottles of beer. They then video them taking part in a sprint. In the background, Vangelis’s Chariots of Fire plays as the cleaners run out of shot. As the camera moves in for a close-up, one of the students produces a foul-looking stew in a bowl. The shot then pans to him as he appears to urinate into it. In the next scene, motherly black women in maids’ uniforms kneel in the dirt courtyard of the student complex awaiting their mock “initiation”. Getting rowdier, the students tell the cleaners to drink and swallow the stew. Gagging, they eventually spit it out. “Whore, drink that whole glass!’’ one student shouts.
“We didn’t know what the stew they gave us was,” recalls Koko today, “but we are convinced it was dog food. It was lukewarm and had gristle in it — it tasted metallic and foul. They treated us like dogs, so it would make sense that they would feed us dog food. We are all worried at what they didn’t film. What else was in it. They say they didn’t urinate in it, but I don’t believe it. They said they staged it and they were just messing around, but we were all sick. That was the most humiliating part for us. That young men we trusted took advantage of us to make a cheap joke and fed us that horrible concoction — raw meat for dogs like we were animals. It makes me vomit just thinking about it. They told us we were eating one of their grandmother’s stews and we had to do a taste test, but when they filmed us eating it they were laughing so hard there were tears in their eyes, pointing as we squatted on the floor.”
In the video, the five staff members — four women and one man — are asked a number of questions including if they know what a “whore” is. Signing off, the young men, gloating and beaming at the camera, hand the workers bottles of whisky for their co-operation.
Accounts of the video soon circulated on campus. The boys must have realised the potentially incendiary nature of the prank, as it was shown to only a few brethren within the Afrikaner community. Perhaps foolishly, one of the students who filmed it proudly gave a copy to his girlfriend. They subsequently broke up, and in an act of revenge, she posted the video on YouTube and Facebook. Within 24 hours, riots had broken out on campus and the police were called in to quell the unrest. Protest marches were held in townships in Bloemfontein. Billyboy Ramahlele, the head of the college’s diversity office, said the issue was “bigger than the university”. It was, he said, “a challenge of the project of nation-building and reconciliation we started in 1994”.
It soon emerged that in the build-up to the scandal, eight black first-year students had been sent to live with the 128 white male students at Reitz. In the weeks that followed, the black students said, their windows were repeatedly broken as they slept. Professor Frederick Fourie, the then rector, heard about the video soon after it was posted on YouTube. An Afrikaner whose father was a professor at the University of the Free State, Fourie said he wept when he reached one scene as he saw the humiliation of “good-hearted women who deserved better from students they had looked after for years”.
The four Afrikaner students said they had made the film for an Afrikaans “cultural evening’’ at Reitz. Two of them were expelled and the other two had finished their studies, so were out of reach of university authorities. All faced, and are still facing, a criminal investigation. Concerned that Reitz had become synonymous with racism, the university shut down the residence, evicting almost 100 students. Fourie has been replaced by the first black rector in the university’s history.
A recent ANC-backed report found that racism is still rife in South African universities. After visiting 23 institutions, the authors concluded that the so-called Reitz video scandal was typical of “pervasive racism” among students, staff and management at institutions regarded as “historically white”. The report also found that de facto segregation in student residences was widespread. Unsurprisingly, Afrikaner groups have spoken out against the report. “We are preserving our way of life. We are at a crucial junction. If we do not take the lead and make a stand, Afrikaner culture will be gone by the time we see our grandchildren,” says Jan Van Niekerk, in the Bloemfontein offices of the Freedom Front Plus party, the main political group in South Africa campaigning for the segregation of university residences. The party has a strong presence on campus, and its alumni are big players nationally. The party’s youth leader, Van Niekerk accepts that the video highlights challenges to racial harmony in South Africa. “It’s a problem in the whole society,” he says. “I’ve been called a f***ing Boer before, and no one ever writes about that. People shouldn’t force integration.”
Professor Jonathan Jansen, the new rector, is behind a sweeping range of measures that will see compulsory black-and-white integration on his campus. “If we fail here in Bloemfontein,” he says, “then South Africa will have failed as a nation. This responsibility is down to me. You have to remember that many of our students — black and white — are from conservative and isolated rural communities and have not had opportunities during their school years to meet each other until now. This is a real melting pot. One of the key issues as I see it is that the white students carry profound fear, an exaggerated fear based on the political transition that is given deep meaning in their homes and churches. Their parents have created this. This is going to change. From January 2010, we are integrating all students on a 50% black, 50% white basis. If they refuse, then they cannot live on campus.
“Many people have come to my office to tell me the boys in that video were ‘just having fun’. They say the ‘squeezas’ took part willingly. For a start,I can’t believe anyone could still call the cleaners squeezas, people who are also older than them. What if it was white women and men on their knees being humiliated by black boys? The reality is that many of our white students are from rural areas, where they were isolated, and every black person they know is utterly subservient.”
Despite all this, the university has come a long way since the heyday of apartheid, when it was a training ground for the Afrikaner civil servants who became cogs in a racist political order. Like many institutions here, the university has undergone a transformation that is sweeping but still incomplete. A majority of the university’s 25,000 students — around 65% — are now black. They are taught in English and Afrikaans. Yet life on campus, it seems, is more divided than ever; separate lessons, separate worship.
“All of this continued division is deeply disturbing for me,” says Jansen. “The black students are leading by example. Let us not forget the importance of history here. This university is 106 years old and tied up with the apartheid project in a very big way. Many of the architects of racism and apartheid studied here. Black students know this, but they still study here. We all need to move on. This is also why we never want to see this Reitz case go to court. We need to forgive and move on.”
At present there is every chance that the scandal will still end up in a criminal court. If found guilty, the students will get a criminal record even if any sentences are suspended.
The government, the parents of the accused and the university authorities are all horrified by the prospect of a “showcase” race trial in the geographical heart of the nation. South Africa’s director of public prosecution has publicly said the criminal case will start at Bloemfontein district court on October 26, but the court has urged both parties to seek an agreement before it comes to trial. “We have given permission to all parties involved to find a resolution before October 26,” said a court spokesperson. Even if the
criminal case is abandoned, a civil action is still likely, say the victims and their key backers, the South African Human Rights Commission. Its spokesperson Mothusi Lepheana says: “On behalf of these five honest and hard-working people, we all need to know why the university created a racist environment.” A civil case could see the cleaners being awarded about 500,000 rand each — around Ł40,000.
Rebecca Adams wakes in darkness and washes her face with cold, brown water. Behind her two-room shack, smoke rises from coal fires burning in the distance. By dawn, hundreds of children in yellow-and-brown school uniforms will emerge across the township.
Seven people live in her brick two-bedroom house in the ragged southern approaches to Bloemfontein. Her grandmother and elderly aunt, both frail women who spend most of their day in bed, have one of the bedrooms. Rebecca shares the other with her husband. Scattered on the living room and bedroom floors are teenage children. Each day Rebecca travels dutifully across the city to her cleaning job at the University of the Free State. One of the five workers in the YouTube video, she is the most reticent of the group, the most reluctant to tell her story.
“I was invisible to everyone before this video happened, but after it came out politicians wanted to speak to me. I met the rector for the first time. We were given tea in his office. My family was hounded by the South African media. I am not an educated woman, but I knew I was being used. Collectively we made a decision to step away from this incident. We stayed away from the university for a short while, but we all kept our jobs, we all went back to work together, although we were moved to another hostel.
“We saw those boys in a different way to how they saw us,” she adds. “I treated them like sons. I cleaned up their hostel and joked with them. I told them off if they made too much of a mess. We helped them when they first came into the hostel. They were young, nervous, we made them tea. They betrayed us. Stuck a knife into our hearts. We were not as intelligent as them, so they manipulated us. They told us they were playing a game.
“I don’t have anger in my heart, but I understand injustice. I have travelled to work at that university for over 25 years. I see black students on campus. I see their hope and ambition. My own daughter aspires to go to university. But for me, the way I am treated, that hasn’t changed. My pastor told me that God wanted me to fight against injustice and that is why I became involved in this legal matter. He also asked me to forgive those boys, but it is not them I wish to forgive. It is their parents, for they made them that way.”
A two-hour drive northwest of Bloemfontein along a highway, running deep into a fertile landscape of corn and sunflower, takes you to Hertzogville. A row of grain silos dominates the town’s skyline, a reminder of the agricultural riches that brought white settlers here more than two centuries ago. White residents own all the small businesses in town. They live in sprawling ranch-style homes with swimming pools and flower gardens, and commute to work by car. Blacks clean the white families’ homes, weed their gardens and till the soil on their farms. This snapshot of post-apartheid life translates into a bigger picture nationally: the average income for whites is often as much as 15 times higher than that of blacks. The “squeezas” at the university earn around Ł160 a month — 70p an hour — and these wages often have to support large families.
In Hertzogville, black labourers continue to address white men as “bass” (boss) and white women as “madam”. They travel to work on foot from isolated townships deep in the bush, where thousands of black families live in a crush of metal shacks. They work on white-owned farms. It was on such family farms that Johnny Roberts and Roelof Malherbe, the two ringleaders of the group behind the Reitz video, grew up. Their farms are easy to find. “Drive 11 kilometres from the town sign and look left. You will see the Roberts farm,” a local shopkeeper tells us, before adding: “Those boys were just fooling around. They are good kids.” From his driveway, we telephone James Roberts, Johnny’s dad. His son, he tells us, is in Namibia. We can go no further, but we can interview him on the phone.
“We are hard-working people who are very private. Why should our sons be punished for fooling around? We were all students once, we all got into trouble. But when race is involved their lives have to be ruined, for what? We all make mistakes.” James Roberts tells us he is prepared to fight a civil case. “When this dies down, the university will be blamed for forcing integration upon students.”
It is getting late. Across from his farmstead, two of James Roberts’s elderly relatives invite us to their home and ask us if we need a bed for the night. Their kindness is disarming. Running towards us, a black worker in his sixties addresses me as “kleinbass” — young boss. “These kids were just messing around,” says Jamie Roberts Sr, James’s uncle. “It’s a real pity what has happened, but we now have proof that Jimmy and his friends didn’t piss on the food. They were misunderstood and misrepresented.”
“When I arrived here on campus in 2008, a white Afrikaner student asked me about my hair,” recalls Paloma Jurie, a chemistry student and a leading light in the University of the Free State’s all-black choir. “I thought she was being nice. She said my braids were beautiful. They were just like her maid’s.” She is the first member of her family to go on to higher education. “Walk around the campus and you will see no integration. I am in a white residence because I was put there, but the white girls refuse to share rooms with blacks. The message to us is, ‘We will tolerate you in our common rooms, but not in our bedrooms.’ What century do they live in? I sing in the black choir, but there is a separate white choir. I also go to church on Sunday but we have separate services for black and white.
“No matter how it’s dressed up, life in the traditional white girls’ residences is difficult for blacks. The Afrikaner girls are uncomfortable around us. They can all speak English but they only want to speak Afrikaans, so the university has to bring in translators to help. It is ridiculous. What they should do is send their parents to integration classes — they are the ones who have created this legacy.”
Across the campus, in the common room of Khayalami hostel, the 21-year-old Afrikaner Charl de Villiers Naudé is considering running for election as a student representative on an “inclusion” ticket. A relative newcomer to the university, he has broken the mould by voluntarily moving into an all black and coloured residence.
“Okay, so in Khayalami we have 176 black and coloured students and I am the only white guy and couldn’t be happier — figure that out,” he says. “Everyone respects me here. It has become a joke. When my friends come to see me they ask for the white guy in the hall. My best friend on campus is a black Zimbabwean studying law. Everyone seems to think it is such a huge deal that I am the one white guy in the toughest black hostel, but I am treated brilliantly by everyone.
“I was brought up to see people for what they are as individuals, not for the colour of their skin. That is the problem with these kids who refuse to integrate, their parents, they are the ones who turn up on campus campaigning for white residences. If these Afrikaner students had their own minds, they would wake up and see we are living in the 21st century, not the Boer war.”
Laukaziemma Koko’s home in Mariadal township is only a dark space on the official map of Bloemfontein. At least she has a street sign now, some sign of progress at least. In recent months, rows of new cinder-block houses have gone up around her home, constructed without electricity or hot water. There is not a single playground, so children play on dirt roads flooded with raw sewage. The grass disappeared long ago. There are perhaps two dozen trees in four square miles.
Inside her home, Laukaziemma opens her refrigerator, empty except for some mouldy bread and a tub of chicken fat. The sugar ran out, so there was nothing to sweeten the breakfast tea. She speaks in a low mumble. “I remember my first day at work at the University of the Free State. I am 40 now. It was 21 years ago. The rules came as a shock. I had to call the young men — the students — kleinbass, and before each shift I had to scrub my hands clean and then put on rubber gloves. I could never take them off on campus. If I touched a student’s food with bare hands, I was told, I would be fired. Also my hair had to be covered and never on show. There were so many rules, we laugh now. The students addressed us as “fairies” and “kaffirs”. We were afraid of everyone. We didn’t dare touch them or come close. We didn’t look them in the eye. I learnt all this on my first day, all of these rules.
“People ask me what has changed since those days, and I suppose I can say that I feel free, but I am still invisible. I am still living in the township. I think about the video every day, like the other cleaners. We treated those boys like our sons, we cooked for them when we weren’t supposed to. We were not expecting them to do such a thing to us. None of us knew we were being filmed by the boys. They deceived us. I still work there because I have no choice, but I see it every day in the attitudes of many of the Afrikaner students. They treat us like we are their slaves. But as Christians we feel sad for the prejudice in these boys’ hearts. If you ask now if things have changed since apartheid, I will tell you honestly: yes and also no.”
In a shack at the bottom of Laukaziemma’s garden, her nephew Khya Koko emerges bleary-eyed. In his hands are his textbooks. He has spent the night revising by torchlight. Like his aunt, he also travels to the University of the Free State, sometimes accompanying her on the bus. Next year he hopes to graduate with honours from a financial-management course. “My generation looks at things differently,” he says. “I have told my aunt to make a stand and this case should go to a civil trial at the very least, as proof that we live in a more progressive society now. They are fools. I am the first in my family to go to university, yet I still live in a township and work with a torch because there are power cuts. The boys who abused my aunt have swimming pools and maids, but no integrity. They are just fools, and time will show them as the last of a dying breed.
“My aunt tells me each night to study hard so I won’t be like her or my mother, but I admire them. They have worked hard all of their lives, through pain and adversity I have never known. I belong to the generation who have a chance to impose our will and beliefs on society. There is still economic inequality between black and white, but for my grandchildren that too will be a distant memory.”
Articulate and intensely bright, Khya tells me that his favourite quote is from the 19th-century progressive French philosopher Ernest Renan. He has written it inside one of his textbooks:
“The definition of the essence of a successful nation is simple: ‘That all individuals must have a lot in common and also that they must all have forgotten a great deal.’” The cleaners at Free State University, however, are determined not to forget.
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