In the interests of reconciliation...

By Michael Moodie g09m2875

Looking back several years, I remember feeling the same sense of disgust and revulsion as I do now at what was done to the workers at the University of the Free State. I remember peering at the newspaper, seeing the humiliation to which the workers were subjected, and feeling sick to pit of my stomach.

Now, as back then, that feeling has returned although for an entirely different reason altogether. "In a gesture of racial reconciliation and the need for healing," said the new Vice Chancellor to the university, "the disciplinary charges against the four accused students will be dropped." As I read these words, I felt the sick in my stomach slowly begin to boil. When these four Afrikaans students decided to humiliate and demean the black workers in the way that they did, they spat in the face of reconciliation. Why is it that it should be reconciliation that saves them from punishment? What they did was unforgivable and they should suffer the consequences for it.

There is a time and a place for forgiveness, healing and reconciliation, but this is not it. South Africa has become too concerned with race relations to see that the actual crime committed here is a crime against our fellow man. Ignore race and ignore colour and see the bare fact here is that no human being should be treated in this way.

Once again Jonathan Shapiro has got it dead right. His latest cartoon in the Mail&Guardian says all that I have just said using no words at all: