The Reitz in all of us “I don’t want to talk about the Reitz 4”, said Professor Jonathan Jansen. “I want to talk about the Reitz in all of us.” Standing in front of a packed room to discuss transformation and community building, Jansen said that despite the massive backlash, he was still convinced that he had done the right thing in welcoming the Reitz 4 back to the University of the Free State. Thousands of letters, emails and messages of support from South Africans show that there are many who agree. Deep divisions Professor Jansen was thrust into the spotlight this year, initially on becoming the first black rector of the University of the Free State, and then because of his controversial handling of the Reitz 4 saga he had inherited. Jansen said when he started at the UFS he found a campus deeply divided with separate classes, separate residences, separate churches and even separate choirs for black and white students. He spent a lot of time with an open office door where students could see him without appointment, and walking around campus, talking to students to find out what was going on, “to get to the bowels of the campus”. By that time the university was already notorious for the incident at the Reitz student residence in 2007 where cleaners had participated in a humiliating video which was placed on YouTube. But Jansen stressed that while the UFS could be the most divided campus in South Africa, lack of transformation and integration was not a UFS problem, but a wider South African one. A small symbolic act Prof. Jansen’s first move – to integrate campus residences on a 50/50 basis from January 2010 – took a beating from the Afrikaans press, who accused him of “gedwonge integrasie” or forced integration. From the strong resistance he received to the integration process, Jansen realised that a symbolic act was needed to allow him to take both black and white students into the future with him. And he knew that this symbolic act would be connected to the Reitz scandal. “It would be easy to say the Reitz 4 are bad apples; we have to get rid of them”, said Jansen. But he believes that would be ignoring the bigger picture. Jansen said the institutions at the UFS were set up in such a way that he could almost predict the Reitz incident. Therefore, as an institution the UFS had to take responsibility for creating an environment where something like the Reitz incident could happen. In his inauguration speech as 13th Rector and Vice-Chancellor of the UFS, Jansen took responsibility on behalf of the institution, announcing that they would not be pursuing further action against the four students and said the students would be allowed back at the university to finish their studies. This created an enormous uproar in the media, and saw officials from different levels of government publicly criticise Jansen, including Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande and the ANC Youth League. According to Jansen, this type of government meddling in the institutional autonomy of a university was previously unheard of. Although it was later clarified that Jansen wasn’t talking about dropping either the criminal charges against the students by the Directorate of Special Prosecutions, or the human rights charges by the Human Rights Commission, the movement of criticism seemed to snowball and build in momentum, even including death threats to Jansen. Jansen said he wasn’t scared at the call to “shoot and kill the rector”, since growing up on the Cape Flats had taught him the difference between a real gangster and a pseudo gangster. But he added that it was upsetting that his family, including his matric daughter, had to read the threats in headlines on the roadside. Maybe the worst thing in the aftermath of his inauguration was the lies, said Jansen. It was widely reported that he did not consult before making the announcement, while Jansen insists that he had consulted widely before coming to a decision. Amazing change But Jansen said the brakes came on and the situation started turning around with a public letter from Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, where he praised Jansen for what he called a “magnanimous gesture” of forgiveness and reconciliation. Later, Jansen had a meeting with controversial ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema. While Jansen has a policy of not talking about what happens in meetings of this kind, he mentioned that one of his staff members taking notes was in tears by the end of it. The stand-off, which Jansen compared to high noon in a Western movie, ended with Malema publicly supporting Jansen, saying “Jansen is one of our own, we cannot feed Jansen to the enemy.” (Incidentally, in an address to the Cape Town Press Club after his meeting with Malema, Jansen said that, contrary to how he is portrayed in the media, Malema is actually “extremely smart” and able to “synthesise a fairly complex set of discussions.”) Jansen also had a personal meeting with the student who had threatened him, which ended in tears and reconciliation. “In my experience, it is unexpected acts of generosity that win people over”, said Jansen. Walking wounded Jansen believes that through this process a little space has opened up for South Africans to talk about things that they didn’t know how to talk about; issues such as racism and transformation. “I’ve received messages from parents saying there is now space for them and their children in this country without being judged for being white or having different views.” But in this space, change needs to happen. “We are all walking wounded that haven’t yet acknowledged our own bitterness, pain, racism and deep antagonism,” said Jansen. “We must create spaces where we can talk about these things and work to understand each other, or we could become another Zimbabwe, another Rwanda or another Northern Ireland.” Jansen said he was still ashamed of the deep bitterness towards white South Africans that he had carried around for a long time. He emphasised that parents now have the responsibility to break the cycle of transmission of negative information about other races to their children. “Remember what you say when a taxi cuts in front of you and your child is sitting in the back seat, look at the example you are setting by your choice of friends,” he said. While Jansen agrees that the Reitz students have to be held responsible for the incident that shocked the country and the world, his message is that this incident can lead to a much wider healing and transformation process… if we are willing to confront the Reitz in each of us.
– By Linda Krige
