EFF statement on the University of Stellenbosch racism
25 August 2015
The EFF is deeply concerned about the racial hostility at the University of Stellenbosch as was exposed in the recent documentary based on experiences of more than 30 students. The documentary shows one black student after another recounting specific experiences of racial abuse in many spaces of the university, including in the class rooms.
It is a fact that the strategy of many white racist groups in South Africa since the demise apartheid is to try and close down many spaces and preserve them as racial enclaves exclusive to white people. These groups do this through raising properties costs so that their neighbourhoods remain predominantly white; they make entrance fees to gyms, entertainment centres and other social spaces expensive hoping that black people will not afford and thus realising their white-only enclaves.
The most dangerous of the strategies to maintain white-only areas is the continued use of the Afrikaans language, as a language of exclusion. Through it, they try to mark territory and limit access, in particular to education and culture. The University of Stellenbosch needs to appreciate this as a fact, that some Afrikaners are manipulating the policy of multiculturalism to try and maintain white-only spaces, including Stellenbosh as a town.
This is because many in the Afrikaner communities fail to accept the new South Africa and continue to relate to Afrikaans as the language of domination and control. This fails to appreciate that Afrikaans is actually spoken by many black people than whites, particularly in the coloured communities. In fact historically, anthropological origins of the Afrikaans language are not exclusive to the Dutch settler communities. Afrikaans was appropriated by colonialists as a language of narrow nationalist domination, when in fact it socially emanated from amongst the blacks and colonised classes.