But South Africans should not be content simply with punishing these four young men. At this point in the country’s history, when the non-racial ideal of the anti-apartheid struggle is being buffeted from many quarters, we should learn from the outcome of the Abu Ghraib revelations.  The US establishment focussed all culpability for that crime on the soldiers directly involved, and stigmatised them as un-American ‘trailer trash’.  Little, thought, if any, was given to the question of wider responsibility for creating the circumstances in which young soldiers deemed it their patriotic duty to treat ostensible enemies like animals.

  

During this past week the South African media have, to their credit, begun to cast the net of accountability wider in the case of the Free State four. The Weekender, for instance, argued powerfully that the Freedom Front Plus should ‘take the rap’ for interventions intended to foster a climate of intolerance at the historically Afrikaans universities, given that this climate can easily give rise to outrageous incidents such as the one at Free State. It argued that the FF+ devotes a great deal of attention to the former Afrikaans campuses (precisely because it is a dismal failure as a national political force), and that the party targets the integration of student residences as an issue over which to encourage at least some white students to draw the proverbial line in the sand.

  

This may all be true, and from our own position at the University of Pretoria we can attest to the baleful influence the FF+ has on student politics. But the Weekender’s insight in this respect runs the risk of demonising not only the individuals who perpetrated the outrage at Free State, but also a far right-wing political party from whose antics many people at these universities would justifiably distance themselves. The danger is that, once again, the majority of those present on these campuses – both staff and students – can wash their hands of an unsavoury incident, and say that it has nothing whatever to do with them.

  

But it does. The sad fact is that the historically Afrikaans universities constitute an intellectual environment that is conducive to destructive intervention by a right-wing party and to occasional outbursts of outright race hatred. Moreover this environment is formed as much by what is not said, or debated, or even thought about, as by what is. There has never, in all the years since apartheid ended, been a systematic, internal critique of the apartheid thinking on which these universities’ intellectual foundations were built, nor any intellectual guidance in this respect from those who lead the universities or from the wider, particularly Afrikaans-speaking, society. The result is all too easy to see.  Left to their own devices most academics and students have shifted from the view that contact between ‘races’ and ‘cultures’ was highly undesirable, if not downright impossible, to a muddled vision that since such contact has now become inevitable, it has to be ‘managed’ in the most advantageous ways. The old ‘culture contact’ debate, which flourished in the context of 19 and early 20 century colonialism, continues to reign in the historically Afrikaans intellectual environment. The questions that dominate the agenda are entirely predictable, since they are a repetition of the earlier colonial debate. Can the ‘natives’ adapt to ‘our’ way of doing things?  Will they lose their culture and identity if they are successful? How can we maintain our own values and standards while we accommodate them?

  

There are some brave individuals within these institutions who buck the trend, but most do not even begin to ask themselves if the ‘culture contact’ questions have any meaning at all under current circumstances (or if they had any meaning, indeed, a century ago). Can ‘races’ and ‘cultures’, which are highly abstract and arguably meaningless concepts, actually come into contact? Can people ever lose ‘their’ culture? Is an individual’s worth determined by his or her racial or cultural identity?  The notion that races and cultures form the basic building blocks of humanity was the core assumption of colonial thinking, and apartheid was an ideology that drew one particular conclusion – that contact between these entities was undesirable – from this view of the world. The new realisation that culture contact is inevitable does not constitute a radical rethinking of the dangerous colonial premise.

  

Yet such a radical rethinking is vitally necessary, because as long as young South Africans are given the impression that ‘races’ and ‘cultures’ are unavoidable facts of nature, and that people can only be understood as the bearers of these identities, we will continue to be shocked by episodes such as the one at Free State University. One can preach understanding and tolerance between the different ‘races’ and ‘cultures’ until one is blue in the face, but these feel-good, superficial values will dissolve like morning mist when confronted by situations of perceived competition between these ostensibly natural entities. The only lasting solution is to take the ideal of ‘non-racialism’ seriously, and to make a sustained critique of their immanent truthfulness.

  

So who, in the final analysis, is responsible for the tragic events at Free State University? We would argue that every lecturer who unthinkingly rehearses the tenets of the culture contact debate, and fails to interrogate the presumptive reality of ‘races’ and ‘cultures’, in the course of teaching, should share part of the blame. The net of accountability also stretches wider, to include every school teacher, every church minister, and every parent who advises the young that all human society is composed of these entities as a matter of given fact and that there is nothing anyone can do to question this.  And, at this level, accountability spreads beyond the ranks of white South Africans, because there are many black people in the country for whom the culture contact framework provides an attractive, or at least a convenient, way of looking at the world.

  

Although a great many South Africans should bear some part of the responsibility for making the events at Free State University possible, we believe that the historically Afrikaans universities have both a duty and, indeed, an important opportunity to lead a thoroughgoing critique of the culture contact premises.  It is one thing for the historically liberal, and largely English-medium, universities to take a stand on these issues (which they have done for years). It would be quite another thing for the historically Afrikaans, apartheid-supporting universities to make their voices heard on this score in unambiguous fashion.  Given their history, they would certainly be listened to.

  

John Sharp and Rehana Vally

   John Sharp and Rehana Vally are professors of social anthropology at the University of Pretoria