IT really does appear as if the universities are locked in a race to the bottom and the apprehension and unease over the calibre of inquiry at these once-great institutes and the quality of leadership they’re turning out is, even here, at the Mahogany Ridge, quite palpable.

First there was Chumani Maxwele, the University of Cape Town politics student who, armed with little more than a pink hard hat and a bucket of soupy crap, launched the #RhodesMustFall campaign. 

This smelly business, supposedly driving a transformation agenda at the university, quickly spread across the country, compelling the Minister of Arts and Culture, Nathi Mthethwa, to make bleating, ubuntuist noises about a new heritage and fast-forwarding the reinvention of the past.

Not to be outdone, the president of the student representative council at the University of the Witwatersrand, Mcebo Dlamini, has now boldly commandeered national attention with his professed admiration of Adolf Hitler.

Although much has already been said of the matter, it is Dlamini’s stubborn and increasingly outrageous attempts to justify his veneration that continues to appall. 

Dlamini’s position first emerged on his Facebook page. It was a stance he vigorously defended when approached by the student newspaper, Wits Vuvuzela. “What I love about Hitler,” Dlamini said, “is his charisma and his capabilities to organise people. We need more leaders of such calibre. I love Adolf Hitler.” 

But it was not wholly blind, this love (which, incidentally, included Robert Mugabe), but apparently quite considered, the product of academic pursuit. “I have researched about president Adolf Hitler,” he said. “I have read books about president Adolf Hitler. I have watched documentaries about president Adolf Hitler.” 

Dlamini further suggested that his social media activity wasn’t aimed at mollifying Jewish sentiment. “Who told them they deserve special treatment? This is an academic space, we must debate issues not to silence individuals,” he said.

The interview was picked up by the national press and an unrepentant Dlamini has since appeared on television a couple of times, floundering away as he tried to defend the indefensible and suggest that, “as an academic”, he had merely been trying to initiate a debate, and that his critics were cherry-picking certain facts about Hitler to suit their own agendas. 

“What puzzles me is that people make the Jewish holocaust to be worse than the black holocaust,” he said. “They are making the Jewish holocaust worse than apartheid.”

They’d ignored all the good stuff, for example, like how “he managed to uplift the spirit of the German people after [the country] went down in 1938” and how he “rose against all odds to become their leader”. 

From this, it’s quite clear that, whatever Dlamini is studying at Wits, it is not history. Perhaps it’s pedantic to make the point, but Hitler was never the president of Germany. He was appointed chancellor in 1933 after the Nazis emerged as the largest elected party in the German Reichstag and set up a coalition government. The following year, after the death of Paul von Hindenburg, the last president of the Weimar Republic, Hitler gave himself the official title of Führer, or Leader, and ushered in the Third Reich.

It may have been a one-party dictatorship based on the totalitarian and autocratic ideology of National Socialism, but spirits were uplifted, and the charisma would soon be felt everywhere. In 1942, Hitler decided to share it with the Russians. To this end, his people –– again, very organised –– rattled off four million copies of Der Untermensch, a brochure to bolster the spirits of troops Moscow-bound. 

“The subhuman,” it read, “is a biological creature, crafted by nature, which has hands, legs, eyes and mouth, even the semblance of a brain. Nevertheless, this terrible creature is only a partial human being . . . Inside of this creature lies wild and unrestrained passions: an incessant need to destroy, filled with the most primitive desires, chaos and coldhearted villainy.”

And who were these subhumans? “Mulattoes and Finn-Asian barbarians, Gypsies and black skin savages all make up this modern underworld of subhumans that is always headed by the appearance of the eternal Jew.”

Dlamini may want to think about that. He may also want to think about this: in addition to the six million Jews murdered, Hitler and the Nazis were directly responsible for the killing of an estimated 19.3 million civilians and prisoners in World War Two. All told, 29 million soldiers and civilians died as a result of Hitler’s war in Europe. 

More worrying, though, is Dlamini’s apparent belief that we are all hopeless and that our salvation is only possible in the hands of a similarly messianic figure. But that’s a discussion for another time.

This article first appeared in the Weekend Argus.