Johannesburg - North West University’s Potchefstroom campus is an apartheid enclave – a hostile and foreign environment for people who are not white Afrikaners.
This was Minister of Higher Education and Training Blade Nzimande’s conclusion as he briefed journalists on Thursday on the outcome of the investigation conducted earlier this year after a video clip showing students performing the Nazi-styled “Heil Puk” salute surfaced.
Nzimande was particularly scathing of the university’s previous vice-chancellor, Theuns Eloff, who retired just after the video emerged. Eloff, he said, had not been prepared to transform Pukke – the traditional name for the Potchefstroom campus of North West University. Instead, the merger of the three former universities in 2004 – Potchefstroom, Vaal and Mafikeng – had been designed to keep the Potchefstroom campus Afrikaans and white.
Initiation rituals for new students were structured to achieve this, and “violate human rights and dehumanise first-year students”.
“The university should be fostering a culture on all its campuses that includes Afrikaans in an open and inclusive manner.” It is “undoubtedly a fact that the Potchefstroom campus of NWU remains fundamentally an apartheid institution, if not an enclave, in urgent need of transformation.
“What’s happening at Potchefstroom… is as good as tearing our constitution apart.
“It is of concern that since 2008 there have been a number of investigations at North West University, external and internal, that have focused on issues of transformation and/or first-year orientation… programmes… and little has been done to deal with these issues,” Nzimande said.
“The recurring findings in all these reports confirm that the problems are specific to the Potchefstroom campus of the university and include residence-specific initiation practices mainly directed at first-year students who are vulnerable, especially those who are not from the dominant Afrikaans feeder schools.
“Given the various reports, the university management… cannot claim ignorance of such practices, but have steadfastly refused to act on the evidence. A culture of fear exists at the institution and people do not talk freely for fear of victimisation,” he said.
Nzimande said the task team had scratched only the tip of the iceberg because the team faced serious challenges in unearthing information. He blamed the delay in releasing the report on the university, saying: “The council had taken a very problematic decision that this report must not be released.
“I am of the view that I am not going to be party to that kind of secrecy. This report is in the public interest. It’s very strange that organisations like (Afrikaner civil rights group) AfriForum, for instance, which prides itself for transparency and fighting for openness, is one of those saying the report must not be released.”
Henk Maree, national chair of AfriForum Youth, said the organisation had issues with the report’s release at this stage because it contained a paragraph that said the majority of the perpetrators of the racist initiation practices were Afrikaans students, mainly from the surrounding feeder schools.
Maree said the organisation considered this to be hate speech.
North West University vice-chancellor Professor Dan Kgwadi said the university didn’t want the report to be released initially because it would have opened the institution to legal action by individuals named in the report. However, this was now water under the bridge because the report had been leaked.
Kgwadi said the university’s priority now was to study the report, implement the findings and “do away with practices that demean human rights”.
Minister’s ‘blackface’ challenge
Meanwhile, Nzimande said he was still awaiting reports from the universities of Pretoria and Stellenbosch after white students from these institutions sparked a furore for daubing their faces with dark paint, which was then leaked on the internet.
Stellenbosch University launched an investigation after a picture of two male students who had their faces painted brown and dressed as tennis stars Serena and Venus Williams caused an uproar on social media earlier this week.
The picture was initially posted on Instagram with the comment: “Let’s hope they don’t get kicked out the varsity for this one.”
The picture was circulated on social media with the hashtag #blackface and led to an outcry, with some calling the students racist.
Earlier this year, two female students from the University of Pretoria posed with cushions pumping up their backsides and wearing domestic workers’ clothing.
The picture was posted online and the students were expelled from their residence after the university ruled that the two had brought the institution’s name into disrepute.
Nzimande said:”This is part of a bigger challenge in the country as a whole in confronting racism and all other forms of discrimination.
“We will do our part as the (department) to confront this.We are not going to let these things go unchallenged.”
The Star