White students urinated in soup for black cleaners

The Scotsman

A VIDEO showing white South African students feeding soup they had urinated in to black campus cleaners has caused outrage in a country scarred by decades of apartheid

University classes were cancelled and staff and students protested yesterday, demanding action against the four men involved.

The video shows one of them urinating into a container of soup placed on a toilet seat at the University of the Free State, in a conservative Afrikaner farming region. "This is the final ingredient," he says, before heating the soup in a microwave oven and giving it to the elderly cleaners, four women and one man.

The cleaners were also taken to a bar where they drank alcohol and danced to Afrikaans music in what was portrayed as an initiation ceremony.

The leaked video – filmed last year – sparked black and white students to demonstrate at the campus, marching to the men's residence in the town of Reitz where it was made. One placard read: "Stop This White Arrogancy".

Police used stun grenades to disperse the crowd and five students were arrested.

In the video, one of the students says: "The boers (Afrikaners] lived happily in Reitz until the day that the previously disadvantaged discovered the word integration in a dictionary. Reitz was then forced to integrate and we started our own selection process."

The Young Communist League of South Africa said the video reflected that some Afrikaner students still "regard our people as inferior human beings equivalent to pigs".

The video, released by South Africa's eTV, is big news in the country. In a front-page story headlined "The Aparthate Video", the Star newspaper ran a sequence of images, showing the elderly cleaners on their knees gagging into buckets after drinking the contaminated soup.

Pamela Sigidi, a student, said: "They should go to jail, because obviously they don't know what it is to pay for something that you have done … because all the time that black people have had to suffer, they don't know anything about suffering."

The university said it had instructed its lawyers to file criminal charges against the students.

"This follows other action taken late yesterday to prohibit two of the four students from the Reitz men's residence, from the campus," a spokesman said.

The other two students in the video had completed their studies and were no longer on campus.