A video filmed in 2007 showing four white Afrikaner students forcing five black domestic workers to eat dirty meat and drink soup into which they had urinated inflamed racial tensions and provoked violent protests between students in 2008, when the video surfaced on the internet. In July 2010, the four white Afrikaners who participated in the attacks, known as the “Reitz Four,” plead guilty to humiliating five black African workers of Free State University in Bloemfontein
The home-made video, which was made to protest about moves to integrate black and white students in the same university residences, shows students at the University of the Free State humiliating black workers, some of whom are elderly.
A violent backlash against the film caused all classes to be suspended yesterday as hundreds of staff and students marched in protest. Police fired stun grenades to disperse an angry crowd gathered outside the whites-only halls of residence where the film was shot.
In the video the white students, who make no attempt to hide their faces, order the black people who were cleaners at the whites-only Reitz hostel to down full bottles of beer. They then lead them to a playing field where they are told to display their athletic skills. In the final extract a white man urinates on food and into a plastic soup container. Then, shouting: “Take! Take!” in Afrikaans — he apparently forces the campus employees to eat the dirty food, causing them to vomit.
A narrative in Afrikaans indicates that the recording was made in protest against the university integration policy. More