SOUTH AFRICA:A VIDEO of white South African university students feeding black cleaners soup they had urinated in has caused outrage in a country scarred by decades of apartheid.
University classes were cancelled and staff and students protested yesterday, demanding action against the four men.
The video shows one student urinating into a container of soup placed on a toilet seat at the University of the Free State, situated in a conservative Afrikaner farming region.
"This is the final ingredient," he said before heating the soup in a microwave oven and giving it to the elderly cleaners.
They were also taken to a bar where they drank alcohol and danced to Afrikaans music in what was portrayed as an initiation ceremony. The leaked video, filmed last year, led black and white students to demonstrate at the campus, marching to the Reitz men's residence where it was made. One placard read: "Stop This White Arrogancy."
Police used stun grenades to disperse the crowd. Five students were arrested and there were incidents of intimidation and damage to property, the university said.
"The Boers (Afrikaners) lived happily in Reitz until the day that the previously disadvantaged discovered the word integration in a dictionary," said one of the students in the video. "Reitz was then forced to integrate and we started our own selection process."
The Young Communist League of South Africa said the video reflected that some Afrikaner students at the university still "regard our people as inferior human beings equivalent to pigs". The video, released by South Africa's eTV, has made big news in the country, where white minority rule ended with multiracial elections in 1994.
In a front-page story headlined "The aparthate video", the Star newspaper ran a sequence of photos of the footage, which shows the elderly cleaners on their knees gagging into buckets after drinking the contaminated soup.
The university said it had instructed its lawyers to file criminal charges against the students.
"This follows other action taken late yesterday to prohibit two of the four students from the Reitz men's residence from the campus," spokesman Anton Fisher said.Two of the students in the video had already completed their studies.