The BMW cabriolet, with its top down, cruises down the main campus road at a leisurely speed.
These are not revellers with too much time on their hands - they are students. Their destination is indeterminate. They could be done for the day or just taking a casual ride between classes.
Nowhere is Thabo Mbeki’s notion of a two-nation state more apparent than at the Wits University campus; the main campus, at least.
It has the vibe consistent with an institution of higher learning of its kind - and class.
Students criss-cross the ample grounds on their way to or from class, lugging satchels, speaking on their ubiquitous palm-size cellphones, the odd couple smooching.
It is all in the day of being a student, young and carefree; there’s nothing wrong there.
But as is true of the national demographics, these students hail from different backgrounds - as far removed as chalk and cheese.
Students here have allocated parking spaces and these are neatly demarcated into 1st year, 2nd, 3rd and 4th-year lots. No confusion.
But if you’re going to wait, as this reporter did, at the entrances to these parking areas to see how many black students wheel into them, you have a long wait coming.
Of course, here and there there’d be a black face behind the wheel of a car.
But if the phrase “drop in the ocean” was meant for any purpose, it was to describe the demographics of mobile students on the Wits campus.
There are several of these parking areas around campus and the same situation obtains - blacks walk; others drive.
Maybe owning a car is not the best yardstick to gauge the number of the haves against the have-nots on campus.
The strikes perhaps offer a better window into understanding the phenomenon of lack and abundance.
Last Monday there was a slight disturbance on campus.
A statement from Shirona Patel, speaking for the university, put it thus: “A group of about 150 individuals, some of whom were Wits students and workers, disrupted some lectures, intimidated and harassed staff and students, and started a fire in an empty lecture theatre. Fortunately, the fire was extinguished quickly and no one was injured. We acted as quickly as we could to stabilise the situation and all academic activities resumed on Tuesday with no further incident.”
Television footage of the incident shows the culprits to have been black students.
A visit to the university will tell any casual observer that students of other race groups have virtually nothing to worry about, other than getting the year mark.
Justifiably or not, black students have too many reasons to overturn flower pots in attempts to impede their peers from continuing with their classes.
The same statement has given the assurance that “no student will be de-registered if they have not made payment by March 31, 2016”.
Maybe the problems should end here and everybody should get back to the routine of their campus lives.
But an unequal society, a microcosm of which Wits is, will never sleep easy; there will always be ructions.
A group of Wits Alumni, including Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) chief Terry Tselane, came together on campus to set up a fundraising initiative last Wednesday.
The South African Fund for Education (Safe) is the vehicle through which this desire to raise funds to help needy students will be realised.
One of the alumni, Tiego Moseneke, the brother of Deputy Chief Justice Dikgang Moseneke, said they were alarmed to learn that “there were students without food and accommodation, who sleep in the library”.
There are no prizes for guessing the race of the students who find themselves in this pickle.
The trustees of Safe include Archbishop Thabo Makgoba, retired Justice Richard Goldstone, Justice Azhar Cachalia and Professor Mamokgethi Phakeng.
But while their effort is commendable, the situation on the university premises continues.
Those who use the university’s bus system remain largely of a darker hue, the children of the so-called Missing Middle or those below them - the offspring of the domestics and the garden boys.
A bus of high school pupils visiting the Planetarium stares out greedily at the rosy picture they see unfolding before their very eyes.
The reality is that when they come here, they will join the usual grind of their brothers and sisters, continue the tradition of either walking or taking the bus.
“Well, the large majority are whites and Indians,” says a male student, one in a group waiting for a bus, when asked who owns the most cars on campus. A no-brainer, really.
“A car?” his mate asks incredulously in response to the question: “Where is your own car?”
“They come from good families,” another in the group ventures.
Meanwhile, in the car park outside David Webster Hall, their Indian peers huddle around for a smoke outside a BMW 3-series.
This car park could give many of its corporate equivalents a run for their money.
The family names are emblazoned on the personalised number plates - and none of these names are Mnisi, Sello, Cele or Xaba.
Graffiti on the underground tunnel leading to the west campus pleads: Can whiteness just fall. Please.
Whiteness is shorthand for wealth, or at least its campus display.
At the bus stop, where at any given moment there are 10 or so buses waiting to pick up or disgorge student commuters, a totally different world opens up.
In their numbers black students get on the buses to residences around Parktown.
“There’s also Hillbrow,” a helpful young commuter volunteers.
In this milieu, there are those waiting for Mom’s Taxi.
And yes, of course, there was a black mother who stopped to pick up her son.
Sunday Independent