Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela

Three years after the barbaric incident at Stellenbosch University where a white student, Theuns du Toit, urinated on a black student’s study material, a court has acquitted him of criminal charges.

A legally sound outcome according to the courts of law, but in the court of public opinion one that fails to address the collective pain Du Toit’s actions evoked among many students who have been on the receiving end of humiliating acts because of the colour of their skin.

In an opinion piece I wrote at the time of this incident, I referred to “the outrage sparked by Du Toit’s barbaric act”, and the pain and trauma “that his actions triggered among many black and brown students”.

For many of these students, Du Toit’s entering Babalo Ndwayana’s room and urinating on his study material was not just a despicable act by an intoxicated student.

The act carried the burden of history and became an echo of the violence of apartheid’s dehumanising treatment. It is also a reminder of their own collective experiences of the insidious violence of racial humiliation and marginalisation that they have encountered in lecture halls and administrative offices, in residences, and in the wider Stellenbosch, as recounted in testimonies to the commission of inquiry that was chaired by Justice Sisi Khampepe.

The State may not have been able to prove that Du Toit acted with criminal intent when he went into Ndwayana’s room. But the impact of his vulgar act exposed the ever-present tension between progress — the moral and psychological possibility of change — and the historical burden and the sheer reality of the legacies of an apartheid past that intrudes into this progress, pushing back against change.

What has become increasingly clear is that this case, in the public imagination, is no longer just about one student’s intoxicated behaviour or another student’s quest for recognition.

Proxies

Du Toit and Ndwayana have come to represent more than themselves. They are proxies for a deeper, unresolved confrontation between our country’s apartheid past and its unfulfilled democratic promise.

The national outrage and political polarisation that erupted after Du Toit’s acquittal attests to this. For many historically marginalised students — at Stellenbosch University (SU) and elsewhere — Du Toit urinating on Ndwayana’s study material became an embodied symbol of the enduring indignities that echo from apartheid and persist in their everyday encounters, the subtle, insidious acts of exclusion and humiliation that undermine their dignity and sense of worth.

Du Toit, in turn, has become a rallying figure, his story a cause célèbre for those who feel that transformation has gone “too far”, or that white identity, especially Afrikaner identity, is under threat and must be defended at all costs.

It is tempting, in moments like these, to reduce the complexity of this moment into a single narrative as a problem of “racism at SU”. That was the framing offered by Makhi Feni, chairperson of the Select Committee on Education, in his remarks about the Du Toit verdict in Parliament last week, that “racism at Stellenbosch University” should be “pinned on old white lecturers”.

He went further to dismiss the urination incident as nothing more than “a clear case of drunkenness and misbehaving youth”.

For a senior government official in higher education, these remarks are not only irresponsible; they reflect a denial of the depth of institutional transformation work still needed across our universities, including the role his own department must play in supporting these efforts.

Dismissing this merely as the recklessness of an intoxicated student is a negation of the experiences of those for whom Du Toit’s actions evoked long-silenced memories of insidious acts of violence against their dignity — and of the serious work that Stellenbosch University has already undertaken in trying to confront its past.

Enduring challenges

The findings of the Khampepe Commission testify to this. Playing the alcohol card will not resolve the enduring challenges we face in our efforts to address the wounds of history that erupt on our university campuses.

There is a moment in the recording that Ndwayana made of the urination incident where Du Toit refers to him as “boy”. According to his lawyer, Dirk van Niekerk, Du Toit cannot be held responsible for what he said or did. “My client was intoxicated,” he reportedly explained in statements in the media, and furthermore, that in passing its verdict, the court “understood the situation very well regarding his intoxication”.

But even though Du Toit’s calling Ndwayana “boy” in the recording was rendered inconsequential in a court of law, used as a form of address, the word in this context is an echo of the historical violence of apartheid when black men were infantilised as a way of asserting white superiority. It should thus not be glossed over simply as a reflection of youthful intoxication.

Of course, I am not suggesting that Du Toit’s use of the term “proves” racist intent — the court has already ruled on this issue. Rather, as a term that carries the burden of historical resonance, the word is part of apartheid’s lexicon of social domination.

Du Toit’s use of the term points to the enduring legacy of what I refer to as the psychic violence of the apartheid mind.

Many students saw themselves in Ndwayana. While the legal slate has been wiped clean for Du Toit, the collective trauma and outrage his actions triggered remain unresolved, silenced and pushed underground, but will continue to play out in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, as with all historical traumas.

The public debate about this issue is now dominated by the narrative of Du Toit’s legal victory. The story of how all of this is affecting Ndwayana, and how he, and others who identify with his experience, are holding up in the face of it all has been overshadowed by the looming spectre of Du Toit’s civil claim.

As Judith Butler has argued, whose voices are allowed to shape public discourse tells us something fundamental about whose lives are considered valuable.

As we brace for the possibility of a civil suit from Du Toit’s lawyers, Stellenbosch University would do well to resist the temptation to settle behind closed doors in the name of reputational damage control.

Doing so would not only silence the public debate that must continue about the emergence of these problems in our institutions, but also risk reinforcing the very dynamics that perpetuate the fault lines that keep confronting us with the unfinished business of our past, which will remain unresolved unless we face this history and its “afterlife” with moral courage.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, for all its flaws, offers insights that show the possibility of creating a space for acknowledgement, truth telling, and moral accountability, the kind of reckoning that law alone cannot deliver. DM