Yesterday’s New York Times presents a snapshot of the hornets’ nest that new University of the Free State rector Jonathan Jansen stirred up with his (in)famous inaugural speech:
Moses Masitha, the student body president, was seated just a few feet away as Mr. Jansen, mellifluous as he is provocative, delivered his 4,100-word inaugural address. “It was a good speech until he said he was going to drop the charges and then my head just sank,” he said. “You knew there was going to be a backlash. I wondered, ‘Has he spoken to anyone about this?’ ”
The video, meant to protest the idea of racial integration in student housing, showed a young man apparently urinating into a bowl of stew. The food was then served to five black house cleaners — known in the dorms as “squeezas” — as they guilelessly cooperated in a mock initiation.
Once transferred to a computer, the video made the digital leap from an inside joke in a single dormitory to an international scandal on the World Wide Web. Fifteen years after apartheid, South Africa was left to ponder not only the ghosts of its racist past but also the demons of its racist present.
And now Mr. Jansen, the first black man to lead the 27,000-student, 105-year-old university, was inviting back the culpable whites without even demanding an apology.
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