By: Clyde Ramalaine
The adage goes that a leopard cannot change its spots. Another insult against black life, another vile abuse of those deemed lesser beings, another degradation of humanity at an institution of higher learning. The racist student Theuns Du Toit explained his dastard and demeaning act of urinating on a black student’s desk and belongings as ‘it’s a white thing.’ He stood less perturbed by the recording of his sickening act because his whiteness permits him to do this. His white privilege extends to him a right in the superlative to be entitled to serve this type of abuse on a black person. I wish I could say this act occurred in history. No, it was not happening in 1984, it is 2022, almost 30 years into democracy, and black lives remain cheap despite so-called freedom.
I submit that Stellenbosch University will never be able to undo or expunge the ontology of its racist past. It is the institution of Higher Learning that defines the apartheid intellectual nucleus. The cradle of apartheid thinking finds it very difficult and awkward to separate itself from its original identity. It is this white thing Theuns Du Toit actualises when he abuses a fellow student Babalwa Ndwayana.
So this degrading and insulting act of a white student urinating on a fellow black student’s desk and possessions is in the DNA of Stellenbosch University. It’s white supremacy on glaring display. Even criminals, at the sight of a running camera, have the presence of mind to stop what they are busy with. Not this entrenched racist who counts on his superior white identity to justify his vile actions. The perpetrator of this despicable crime continued with a sense of entitled arrogance, as explained by his exceptional white identity. This depraved mind felt justified to act out his sick racist eugenics, stuck mind with a sense of impunity.
Following this dastard act, news reports carried the words of the victim Babalwa Ndwayana. Words of his willingness to forgive the perpetrator. At first pause, the victim’s thoughts, for some, attest to maturity, the better man’s psyche, and even that of a genuinely Christian ethic. However, veiled in this apparent forgiveness offer is the actual or more significant problem of this incident and what is wrong with Mzansi. In Mzansi, It speaks of the black victim as always having to be willing to underwrite the reconciliation as normative. Blacks are innately expected to be the better person, the conciliatory what I choose to call the Mandela syndrome that prescribes to blacks an obsession with reconciliation as their natural disposition.
Notice there is no coverage of Du Toit as a perpetrator seeking forgiveness, but he is offered such for free. Perhaps this is what is wrong with South Africa, the negotiated-settlement nation where whites outfoxed ANC leaders. They offered apartheid and colonial benefactors and perpetrators forgiveness the latter never sought. Blacks stood ready to say we forgave you when there was no appeal or genuine repentance for perpetrated wrongs. The expensive accident of the notion of a ‘Rainbow Nation’ was the product of late Anglican Archbishop Tutu, who was willing to have reconciliation at any costs.
The TRC remains a flawed process where the truth was sacrificed at the alter of reconciliation.
It sacrificed the truth for reconciliation to benefit white superior identity. Blacks are scripted to be the better person, while whites are excused and offered forgiveness even if they do not want it. Babalwa’s conciliatory stance even before the perpetrator admits wrong and seeks forgiveness is evidence of the actual state of nation-building in SA. I would not know what it is if this is not the cheapening of the nobility of forgiveness. We are tired of being the good guys, Mandela and Tutu’s condemnable shackles without our permission placed upon us.
Stellenbosch, in its known history, is the institution that provided the architecture of apartheid thinking. Matieland, in its more recent history, is also the place where the strategy for the capture of the ANC’s historic mission as early as 1987 was crafted. Yet more manifestly in how it aided the National Party to negotiate this deplorable Constitution in exchange for a few seats at the table of the commanding heights of the unreconstructed Apartheid economy.
This is the very institution that former Public Protector Thuli Madonsela, as invited by the self-appointed Boer-godfather Johann Rupert, joined and handsomely rewarded her for her role in a DA-led state capture narrative with a questionable professorship. We also know that it is rumoured that Madonsela’s package rivals that of the VCs, which confirms her duly calibrated and acclimatized in her ideological leanings.
We should expect Afriforum to lead a counter-narrative, enthusiastically supported by media houses and publications, even funding the legal fees. Expect the fossilized apartheid apologist – Helen Zille – to compile a disturbing and incoherent defence to impress the hardcore racists in the DA with whom she competes with the Freedom Front Plus.
At Stellenbosch University, white students hurled racist insults at a black female law student as late as last week. The response is an investigation. You cannot investigate racism at an institution born from racist thinking. How do you investigate the DNA of the institution when its existence is inextricably linked to racism.
I believe Stellenbosch University reluctantly accommodates blacks be it academic staff, workers or students, but all blacks associated with this institution know they are unwanted guests at the cradle of Apartheid. It is the institution that some of us contend remains responsible for the death of its former VC Russel Botman because his frustration with the impossibility of transformation left him restless to know how little he could do. That he, as vice-chancellor, did not have control over the actual resources of Stellenbosch.
It is even argued that promotion at the academic level does not occur for outspoken black staff. Meaning you must be a ja-broer. The qualification for promotion is claimed you must spell no threat to the racist DNA of Stellenbosch. Those who made it to be appointed into professorship here were necessarily in their student days at institutions like UWC, nowhere active in activism or consciousness of social justice and its warranted dictates.
In this sense, I am forced to ask to show us who among the BEE empowered black academic staff makes for a really outspoken black academic from this institution?. Show us their consistent involvement in public discourse to decry the injustice of a transformed economy. Let those who are today are heading Stellenbosch faculties lift their hands to show us how they have publicly protested the issue of landless-ness and the fact that land remains owned by whites. You guessed right. They are silent because they have always been silent daily, acclimatized to the rooi-wyntjie and vleis-braai moments. They are very comfortable being the only black in a sea of whiteness, spelling no threat to white privilege instead of supporting it as an accomplice. Yes, I am talking about assimilated and calibrated mild black academics willing to toe the line.
Stellenbosch will never transform; it cannot. How does anyone expect the womb of Apartheid to change its original purpose and become a beacon of transformation? It is a contradiction by itself.
Finally, this is the very generation of whites who maintain that Apartheid is in the time-zone of their forefathers only. That Apartheid died with their passing. Apartheid is a historical reality that warrants no mention or reference in this epoch since we are in a democracy. So expect more of what Theuns Du Toit, in a colloquial and brazen arrogance, explains as ‘it’s a white thing.’
*Clyde N.S Ramalaine
Political Analyst and Commentator
Recently completed his PhD in Politics and International Affairs at UJ.
