OUT TO LUNCH

By sheer chance I was having a pre-luncheon drink in the Cape Town CBD with an octogenarian Wilgenhof alumnus just hours before Marie-Louise Antoni’s ‘The War on Wilgenhof (I)’ popped up on this

website last Thursday. It is such an excellent and thorough analysis of the farcical goings on at what appears to be a newly woke Stellenbosch university and I’m eagerly looking forward to the next instalment.

My drinking companion of last Thursday is a regular Politicsweb reader and was keen to meet up to brief me on what is happening to Wilgenhof. He came prepared with an indexed sheaf of notes giving background and highlighting some of the pro and anti articles that had appeared since the ‘shocking’ discovery of the torture rooms in January of this year. ___STEADY_PAYWALL___

Needless to say News 24 (which laughingly describes itself as ‘South Africa’s leading source of trusted news’) swung into action with journalist Prega Govender penning a piece titled ‘Inside SU’s house of horrors’. Say what you like about News24 but when it comes to hyperbole and clickbait they are masters and never let facts get in the way of a good piece of race baiting fiction.

Marie-Louise references this article and a later one in her column but, surprise, surprise….when you click on the link up comes the message ‘We’re sorry, the page you requested does not exist’. It might be more honest to say that it no longer exists because News24 realised what a load of horse manure it all was and scrubbed all evidence of it from their website. But there I go again, using honesty and News24 in the same sentence.

January can often be a slow news month and so when the keen young newshounds of News24 fail to find anybody only selling hotdogs to white people or come up against a brick wall in their relentless search for elderly ladies using words like ‘monkey’ on their social media pages it must come as a huge relief to discover a couple of rooms full of Nazi and KKK memorabilia at a men’s residence at one of our top universities.

Hold the front page and send the photographers along before the residence authorities have time to clean the place up. Better than that, tell the photographers to feel free to re-arrange objects for maximum shock effect.

These damn Nazis mustn’t be allowed to get away with anything, although the alleged used condom on the floor does require some explanation in an all male residence. Was it recently used I wonder or has it been festering there for years? The clear subliminal message here is that women were probably lured to the dreaded torture room, presumably to be raped in keeping with proud Nazi tradition.

Not surprisingly others were quick to jump on the bandwagon and in February of this year the Daily Maverick published a shock/horror piece by Marianne Thamm ‘Sadistic rituals uncovered…shed light on the dark wellspring of Afrikaner nationalism’

As would be expected many Wilgenhof alumni have rallied to the defence of their former university residence. Maybe in the hopes of persuading those hell bent on closing the place down to placate those who are either suffering from elitism envy (incurable sadly) or who just want to teach the Afrikaners a lesson.

As Jaco Rabie, the spokesman for the Wilgenhof Alumni Association, put it in a submission “The Association acknowledges in its submission that more can be done to ensure an ever-improving integration…..However, the media and the Investigative Report have made defamatory accusations of racism and oppression. Misrepresented and decontextualized, the two rooms resulted in damage to the good name of the residence and the university. Wilgenhof is not a racist or oppressive space.

Prof Emeritus John Dugard, in a letter to the editor of News24, objects to the report’s assertion that Wilgenhof reflected the apartheid ideology of the time. On the contrary, he and other Wilgenhoffers have clearly stated that open debate, independence of thought and racial tolerance were hallmarks of the residence. He also makes the point that prayers before dinner were led by all religious denominations, including Judaism.

As Marie-Louise mentions in her column, the investigating panel found

“no evidence of physical violence, sexual violence or sexually inappropriate behaviour having been perpetrated by the Nagligte against the Wilgenhof residents.”

What becomes apparent reading all the literature and correspondence relating to Wilgenhof is that the panel were given the desired outcome upfront and told to come up with a report that would support that outcome. So there’s all sorts of wishy-washy stuff about the number 88, strange costumes, rude words, weird rituals and imagined links to the Nazi party and the KKK.

But what university of any consequence doesn’t seek to score points over its competitors? Even within a university there is elitism with some residences (or colleges in the case of Oxford or Cambridge) seeking to attract the best and brightest and construct elaborate, and largely harmless, initiation rituals.

Happily these initiation rituals don’t involve being covered in white powder and being sent with only a blanket into the chilly mountains while you wait for some old guy with a shaking hand to perform a ritual circumcision on you. Oh but that’s OK because it is a ‘cultural thing’ innit?

Well so is Wilgenhof and it’s a cultural thing that any sensible university would be proud of rather than trying to stamp out. But, alas, the gods of Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity now reign supreme and the new Wilgenhof will no doubt be ‘repurposed’ so as to not trigger sensitive students who may not be feeling 100% at ease with their gender assignment. Personal pronouns will be obligatory and a newly formed university thought-police squad will be on call twenty four hours a day watching for microaggressions.

If I had ever been fortunate enough to have been a student at Stellenbosch I would have loved to have been housed in Wilgenhof and quite accepting of the initiation pranks. I have met many Wilgenhoffers over the years, often without realising it, and none have shown any desire to invade Poland or to lynch their darker skinned compatriots. On the contrary, they have all been generous spirited, open minded, well educated high end contributors to this country’s economy. And that, I suspect, is the real problem.

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There’s much heated debate in the UK at the moment about what they are calling ‘assisted dying’and what the objectors are referring to as ‘assisted suicide’.

A backbencher called Kim Leadbeater has introduced a private member’s bill which, if passed, would allow assisted dying and no longer make it a crime to assist in someone’s suicide; an offence which could carry a fourteen year prison sentence.

Obviously, there are all sorts of objections to the idea of assisted dying with many citing religious reasons. Others say that it should only be available in exceptional circumstances when the patient is suffering from an incurable illness and life has become too much to bear. But suppose the illness is mental and not physical? Who is to say how much mental anguish someone should suffer before ending it all?

At the moment the suggestion is that your application to die would need to be signed off by two doctors and a judge and that condition alone would tempt many people to take their own lives.

I’ve long held the view that people should be free to end their own lives whenever they choose and should neither be judged for the decision or have any friends or relatives held responsible. Sadly, this is not the view of the legislators so if you have had enough and want to end it all you either have to jump off a cliff or throw yourself in front of a fast moving truck unless overdosing is your chosen exit strategy.