AfriForum and its youth wing, AfriForum Youth, you are playing a dangerous game, unnecessarily exacerbating the already frayed racial tensions in this country, and this needs to stop. Now!
This past week, at the precincts of the University of Pretoria, members of the AfriForum Youth provocatively pasted on the walls of the institution’s entrance stickers that read: “Blacks only” and “No whites allowed”.
The rationale for this dangerous racist motivated prank, as propounded by the youth organisation, is that this was “to place spotlight on racial exclusion and the university’s double standards”.
We need not repeat the simple logic that when one group feels aggrieved, there are forums at the university to vent about sticky issues. However, in whatever angle we approach this extremism by the youth formation, what is inescapable is that this is a representation of warped racist mentality gleaned, holus-bolus, from the Verwoerdian play book.
The racist stickers pasted at the entrance of the university’s Hatfield campus entrance, now inversely replayed by the perpetrators 30 years after the demise of the apartheid racist philosophy, are but a reflection of a racist mind at play.
This thinking is a patent attempt by the youth organisation to hark back to the good old days of white supremacy that gave oxygen to the apartheid ideology of racial exclusion, in which black people were gleefully seen as pariahs not deserving of justice and human rights.
The ideology of apartheid might have constitutionally and legally been removed from the statutes but it remains embedded in people’s psyche.
This phenomenon displayed at the university by the young white students is a reminder that there are many white people who are not committed to the ideal of decolonising and deracialising society – correcting the wrongs of the past, which continue to remain entrenched in the minds of the many.
Racial discrimination is a blueprint or design plan that has proved hard to expunge from the mind of many in white communities. It gives many a sense of false superiority – something that does not exist. Human beings have the same needs. But racist ideology distorts reality; it replaces it with fantasy.
That, in a sense, explains why the struggle for social justice and redress continues to be on the lips of millions of black people, and continues to be an unending struggle. Poverty and exclusion of all kinds in this country is represented largely by black faces. Of the millions of unemployed people in this country, the numbers tell us black people are on top of the heap. This fact is indisputable.
Lastly, universities are centres of learning, interrogation and inquiry and of expanding horizon of knowledge. In the final analysis, the University of Pretoria is a place of all students of this country, and not one section of the population.
The stickers by the AfriForum “Black only” and No whites” are problematic and diversionary. They seek to bastardise and pervert the truth as we know it.
Apartheid is dead. Verwoerd is dead.
Let us get on with the project of using universities for the purpose they were designed for.
