White students forced black cleaners to eat urine-soaked meat in South Africa
Four white students have pleaded guilty to charges surrounding a video they made humiliating black university employees by forcing them to consume food and drinks that they thought were tainted with urine.
The men on trial, all students at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa, today admitted charges of illegally and deliberately injuring another person’s dignity.
They will be sentenced tomorrow when they are expected to be fined up to £3,000 and not be jailed.
Racist video: The four university students, from left, Schalk van der Merwe, Johnny Roberts, RC Malherbe and Dane Grobler, at court today
The video showed the university employees – four middle-aged women and one man – being forced to re-enact the initiation rights normally given to students trying to get into halls of residence.
The staff were allegedly forced to drink full bottles of beer and perform athletic tasks.
But it is the final extract of the film that drew outright condemnation.
A white student urinates on food, and then shouts ‘Take! Take!’ in Afrikaans. The university employees are then forced to eat the dirty food, which causes them to vomit.
Lawyers for the four former students – Roelof Malherbe, Schalk Van Der Merwe, Danie Grobler and Johnny Roberts – said although it appeared as if the food had been urinated on, a ‘harmless’ liquid had been squirted from a bottle.
The video was shot in 2007 at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, 250miles south-west of Johannesburg.
There was a national outcry when the footage first surfaced in 2008.
Police were called in to disperse stone-throwing students on the sprawling campus and classes were cancelled.
Such was the controversy that the men’s hall of residence where the video was shut was shut down.
The four former students are Afrikaners, descendants of Dutch settlers who are often most closely linked with white apartheid rule.
The university in the city of Bloemfontein has been regarded as a bastion for Afrikaners.
Malherbe and Van Der Merwe were banned from the campus when the video surfaced; Grobler and Roberts had already graduated and left campus.
Commentary on the video in Afrikaans included sarcastic references to the university’s policy of integrating the campus halls of residence – years after the end of apartheid.
Black students make up 60 per cent of the Free State university’s 25,000-strong student body. Most of the support staff are black but the teaching staff are mainly white.
Multi-racial elections in 1994 ended decades of white rule in South Africa but racial undercurrents remained strong.
Lawyers for the students said although it appeared as if the food had been urinated on, a ‘harmless’ liquid had been squirted from a bottle
Apologising in a statement read out in court today, two of the students said they had been ‘crucified as racists’ and regretted making the film, meant as a ‘satirical slant’ on the issue of racial integration at the university hostels.
In a sign of the gravity of the case, South Africa’s most senior prosecutor, Johan Kruger, appeared for the state today.
Renowned defence attorney Kemp J. Kemp, who represented Jacob Zuma before he took office as president last year, represented the students. Prosecutors dropped the corruption charges against Zuma.
The court accepted the guilty plea and adjourned to Wednesday for closing arguments from attorneys on sentencing that is unlikely to include imprisonment.
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