By Boyd Webb and Angela Quintal
The video showing white students humiliating and abusing elderly black workers at the Free State University would have serious repercussions for South Africa, DA leader Helen Zille said on Thursday.
"That is the tragedy as we are trying to move away from a society built on race categorisations and race group generalisations. This kind of thing drives us right back to those kinds of descriptions."
Zille said 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".
| 'Are they going to be complacent and suggest this is an isolated incident' |
She was speaking after a meeting of her party's parliamentary caucus, in which footage of Freedom Front Plus protests against integration at the university was played to MPs and reporters.
Zille said the racist video also protesting integration 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.
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"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 behaviour of a few individuals, but see it as part of a culture of an institution and even worse associate this kind of behaviour with a whole category of people, white South Africans in particular and white Afrikaners in particular."
In parliament on Thursday, the gauntlet was thrown with a challenge to Afrikaners across the country to denounce the four students and all they stood for or risk being tarred with the same brush.
Addressing MPs, Deputy Education Minister Enver Surty said the way in which Afrikaners responded to the "atrocious act" could go a long way to nation-building.
"Are they going to be complacent and suggest this is an isolated incident, which they should ignore or are they going to mobilise the youth to ensure they create positive values and seek and strive towards this ethos of ours - a non-racial, non-sexist democracy?" he asked.
- This article was originally published on page 8 of Cape Argus on February 29, 2008
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