BLOEMFONTEIN, South Africa
A worker from the video at a news conference last month. She and others were shown being humiliated by the students.
In the next scene, motherly black women in maids’ uniforms kneel in the dirt courtyard of the Reitz student residence complex, awaiting their mock initiation into the all-white house. Rowdy students tell the women who mop their floors and scrub their toilets to swallow the stew. Gagging, the women spit it out.
“Whore, drink that whole glass!” shouts one student.
This incendiary video, made with casual cruelty, recently leaped from the small, enclosed world of the Reitz residence to the World Wide Web. The four Afrikaner students who made it in September for a “cultural evening” at Reitz are now under criminal investigation. Two of them are barred from the campus; the other two completed their studies before the inquiry.
The university, concerned that Reitz has become synonymous with racism, is considering shutting down the residence. On Friday, the university’s governing body condemned the video as racist and an insult to women and poor working people.
A lawyer for the students, Nico Naude, said the video had been made “in the spirit of fun,” that the women had participated willingly and that the student did not urinate in the food but had squeezed a drink from a bottle.
Fusi Nchabeng, the provincial secretary for the women’s union, the National Education Health and Allied Workers Union, said the women did not know the video was made to protest integration, nor that, as they now believe, the food was urinated on. He declined to make the women available for an interview because the case is under criminal investigation, but he said they had worked at the residence for years and felt betrayed by the students and degraded by the video.
As the video and postings about it spread to YouTube and Facebook, it has provoked ever more bitter racial division on the campus and soul-searching across the country. “It’s bigger than the university,” said Billyboy Ramahlele, who heads the university’s diversity office. “It’s bigger than the four students. It’s really a challenge of the project of nation-building and reconciliation we started in 1994.”
That was the year white rule finally ended in South Africa. The University of the Free State 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 South African institutions, the university has undergone a transformation that is sweeping, but still incomplete. A majority of the university’s 25,000 students are now black. They are taught in English as well as Afrikaans, the language of the Afrikaners.
The hostels where students live, however, were still segregated after an earlier effort at integration ended in violence a decade ago. Then in January, after months of debate, the university moved again to integrate the residences, assigning black first-year students in white, Afrikaner hostels and whites in black residences. The white students generally did not take the spots allotted to them in the black residences, university officials said.
Eight black first-year students were sent to live with 128 white male students at Reitz.
“They seriously don’t want us here,” said Buzwe Tsawu, 19, an aspiring architect whose painterly self-portrait hangs on the wall.
At 3 o’clock one morning in mid-January, the eight black students were awakened with a bang as firecrackers were tossed through the open windows of the four bedrooms of their bungalow, they said. In the weeks that followed, they said, their windows were repeatedly broken as they slept. One weekend, as the seniors gathered at the social club next door to drink and party and braai, as barbecuing is called in South Africa, the newcomers were subjected to verbal abuse.
“They were trying to scare us, make us leave,” said Kulani Mngadi, 19.
But the black students made a pact to stick it out. “We’re going to change this place,” said Ruddy Banyini, a 19-year-old who is studying bioinfomatics, using computer tools to search genetic databases. “We’ll prevent next year’s black first-years from feeling what we felt.”
Many Afrikaners see what they call “forced integration” as a threat to the cultural identity of their embattled minority, descended from Dutch settlers.
Symbols of the apartheid-era past are still to be found in the Afrikaner hostels. The Hendrik Verwoerd residence, named at its opening in 1968 for the assassinated architect of apartheid, was given a new name, Armentum, two years ago. Armentum is Latin for herd. A bust of Mr. Verwoerd, a white supremacist, remains in a meeting room, and his portrait and memorabilia line the walls of the senior social club.
The hostel now has 18 blacks among its 160 residents, and its leader, Van Aardt Cloete, a 21-year-old senior, acknowledged the need to change the name because it “was sensitive for black people.” But he also said Armentum would keep a room in the hostel as a museum to showcase the Verwoerd past.
Pieter Odendaal, a 23-year-old senior who is the head of Reitz house, said: “There’s a fear, especially among young white South Africans, that there isn’t a future in this land anymore, that there’s all this black empowerment. We don’t have anything to do with apartheid. Why must they take away our job opportunities? Why must we give up our language? People just want to hold onto the last thing we still have: our Afrikaans-speaking hostel, playing rugby, braaiing, listening to Afrikaans music.”
The Reitz student video was made last year as the integration debate raged. “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.”
Frederick Fourie, the rector of the University of the Free State, heard about the video on Feb. 26 and watched it that morning. An Afrikaner whose father was a professor here, Mr. Fourie said he wept when he reached one scene.
It showed a muscular white student starting a race of four hefty black cleaning women, set in slow motion to the theme music from “Chariots of Fire” — a scene Mr. Fourie felt humiliated good-hearted women who deserved better from students they had looked after.
When he saw the urination scene, he knew he had a public relations disaster on his hands.
The next day, he met with the tearful cleaning women. “My heart was sore,” he said. “They’d trusted these boys as their own sons. I apologized for what had happened to them at the university. I told them: ‘My heart is broken. I cry with you.’ ”
