Tempers are rising again over race.  The ANC Youth League wants a black man shot “dead like a criminal” because he pardoned four white students.  Cosatu in the North West is turning its anti-labour broking march against Sun City into an anti-racism march because of a CD played by a security company employee.  We don’t know the full details, but we know it involves the tune of the national anthem (or some part of it), the name of Nelson Mandela and the K-word.  Use your imagination.

In both situations, facts and logic have been thrown out of the window.  And quite frankly, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  It’s simply enough now.  This is the 21st Century.  People should be passionate about this.

Eyewitness News is carrying an interview this morning with the former Free State University vice-chancellor Frederick Fourie who speaks of his frustration in trying to integrate the institution’s residences.  It seems the Freedom Front Plus is the villain in the piece here.  He points out how the party tried to make this part of a national issue, how it ran what he called a “well-organised campaign” that centred on the loss of a way of life and the fact that residences’ traditions would disappear.  (That’s right.  We must keep whites-only resses, because we must still be allowed to have a streak up the stairs once a year.)

Fourie says a large part of the university’s senate and the alumni supported the FF+.  Clearly Jonathan Jansen is right, the community must take some of the blame for what happened.  Fourie must have wanted to say 'I told you so!' when that video emerged.

But you’d like to think this could only happen in Bloemfontein  You’d be wrong, of course.  Because out near Rustenburg some idiot, at a potjiekos competition (you really couldn’t make that up), played that song about Madiba.  Now, if you were that stupid, you might get away with a racist version of the national anthem.  Using the K-word would be pushing it.  But adding the name of Nelson Mandela is going to land you in jail.

We don’t like to advocate thought control, or time in jail for thinking certain thoughts, and we think the legal case might turn out to be a little thin (generally crimen injuria is a civil case, so you can’t be arrested for it, but you can be charged criminally with hate speech).  We also believe firmly in the rule of law.  But we can live with the fact that someone spent a few hours in jail for this one.

In this case, the boss was very clever.  He’s Ben Berger and he runs Falcon Security.  He got himself lawyered up, and then rushed off to a top PR agency.  And it worked.  They put out the right statements, got him on the phone to radio stations and generally spun like hell.  Within hours the image of a group of whites singing along to a racist tune had changed dramatically.  Now it was a stack of CDs lying around next to the machine.  Someone put in a CD to see what was on it.  Only 15 seconds of the song was played before someone realised what it was, and switched it off.  Then the story runs into a few problems.  In their version, Sun City management called the police.  After 15 seconds… Really?  And they wouldn’t want to get themselves in the media at all about something like this.

Cosatu firmly believes they were all singing along to the song, and nothing is going to change its mind on that.  Someone has now been fired (a worker who allegedly admitted to owning the CD … it’s a security company … how do you think that investigation was conducted?), and the firm will hope that’ll do it.  It probably won’t, in that this has happened at the wrong time for them.  Cosatu is going to march on this issue. It’s going to talk about it all the time, and it’ll bang this drum for ages.  Basically labour brokers are going to be classed as people who produce CDs like this.  It’ll add political heat to the whole thing.

But that’s nothing compared to the possible political fallout from Bloemfontein.  If Fourie’s claims about the FF+ stand up and the party doesn’t handle this properly, it could find itself in real trouble.  The ANC is furious about the Reitz affair.  The spectre of that kind of racism will bring back the worst apartheid memories.  Its structures are hugely involved in putting pressure on the university to change its mind on the pardoning issue.  The higher education ministry, the ANC Youth League and the ANC Women’s League have decided this is something up with which they shall not put.  The fact that it happened in the first place is a direct result of segregated resses.  That’s the fault of the FF+, which is, technically at least, in a coalition government with the ANC.

In Bloemfontein there are signs that cooler heads are beginning to prevail.  Malema is to meet with Jansen. Nzimande “respects the right of the university to run itself”. And Jansen is looking at the whole issue again.  But Rustenberg...  Someone should keep Malema out of there for a while.

There is another aspect to all of this.  The geography is not surprising.  Why is it that in the big cities this kind of thing simply doesn’t seem to happen?  Why is it always in the platteland, and why does it seem that the cliché is always real?  Why is the black person always the victim?  Why are whites always forgiven or fined?  It’s time to end this.  Name, shame and find some way to take real action.

(Stephen Grootes is an EyeWitness News reporter)