Outrage at racist video of workers tricked into eating urine-soaked meat

A VIDEO recording of black workers made to perform degrading acts by white university students has sparked outrage in South Africa and cast a new spotlight on racism in the “Rainbow Nation”.

The home-made film, described as “shocking and disgusting“, shows five laughing black workers taking part in a number of initiation-like rituals, including going down on their knees and eating meat a student had urinated on.

The recording was dubbed “The aparthate video” by The Star newspaper — a play on the racist system of white-minority rule (apartheid) that ended in South Africa in 1994.

University of the Free State spokesman Anton Fisher said the cleaners may have been duped.

A narrative in Afrikaans indicates the recording was made in protest against a new university integration policy that would see black and white students mix more in residences.

“Once upon a time the boere [Afrikaners] lived peacefully here on Reitz Island, until one day when the less-advantaged discovered the word ‘integration’ in the dictionary,” a resident of the once exclusively white Reitz men’s hostel says on the tape.

The video shows the workers — four women and a man — downing beer, dancing and participating in mock rugby practice, after which they are given meat to eat on which one of the students had been filmed urinating. The video ends with the words: “That, at the end of the day, is what we think of integration.”

Fisher said he received a copy of the video, filmed last September, on Tuesday, and immediately alerted management of the historically white university in the former independent Free State Afrikaner republic. He said two of the students on the video had already completed their studies and left. The other two have been barred from campus.

Tensions have been simmering on campus over an integration policy introduced this year that aims to make black and white students mix more in university hostels, but has led to protests that saw rioting last week.

The leader of the main opposition Democratic Alliance, Helen Zille, called for a probe of “underlying causes of racial tension at the university and other institutions that face similar challenges around racial integration”.

Jody Kollapen, chairman of the Human Rights Commission set up by the constitution, said those responsible should be prosecuted.

“It is so unconscionable we should not be willing to discuss or negotiate it.”