At a rugby match I watched on Saturday afternoon this past weekend, three young people seated in front of me caught my attention for a few minutes.
Two — a man and a woman — were clearly a couple, the third was a man of about the same age and equally clearly a friend of both. They looked 19 or 20 years old, and radiated an easy intimacy with each other and a relaxed enjoyment of both the sporting spectacle before them and of the company of their friends around them in the crowded stands.
None of this would normally have attracted my attention — except that the three were students at the University of the Free State (UFS) and this was the weekend when a national newspaper’s front page screamed “Nuwe rasmoles ruk Kovsies” (“New race uproar rocks UFS”), another echoed it with the headline “Race row rocks varsity”, and Bloemfontein’s only daily paper informed locals: “UV kry hofbevel teen Sasco” (“UFS gets court order against Sasco”).
But the amicably gentle trio in front of me — at UFS’s Xerox Shimlapark stadium, watching a rugby match between Kovsies (UFS) and Pukke (University of the North West — formerly Potch) on the second day of last weekend’s two-day intervarsity — appeared unfamiliar with such media coverage.
Or at least, they were not following a media script that portrayed a campus of volatile racial loathing and tension. For the young couple were white and their mutual friend black.
Intriguingly, there was a second stereotype — one independent of race — that the relaxed trio also seemed to challenge. The friendship between the young white woman and her black fellow student showed itself partly in mutual physical intimacy: as they talked, they frequently touched each other — with their hands, with knees, with a shifting of one’s hip into the other’s to emphasise a point or relish a shared joke.
But at no point did the women’s boyfriend display any of the hostility — towards either his girlfriend or their mutual friend — that gender stereotypes tell us men often do in such circumstances: in some social spaces, often bars, you take your life in your hands as a man if your eye lingers for a millisecond too long on another man’s girlfriend.
From the Shimlapark trio there were none of the body-language signs that Desmond Morris (in The Naked Ape and The Human Zoo) has taught us to read as signifying hostility, competitiveness or even mild unease. On the contrary, at one point, illustrating a point he was making to the white girlfriend, the black student reached across her and held up the lengthy blond hair spilling over her boyfriend’s collar, talking softly as he did so, to the evident amusement of the couple.
I noticed this peaceful trio merely because they were right in front of me: in no other striking ways did they stand apart from what I experienced of the approximately 8 000 other people at this intervarsity rugby match. A crowd made up of perhaps 70% white young people, 30% black, showed — like the three young friends — every sign of relaxed enjoyment of the gala sport spectacle in front of them and of their own company.
So, where was the “nuwe rasmoles” apparently “rocking” UFS? It was not, to be sure, nothing: Sasco had run on to the court during an Under-19 netball match the day before (Friday August 6) — the first of the series of sports encounters between two varsities with long histories of mutual sporting engagements and white-Afrikaner exclusivity.
UFS’s Sasco branch claimed North West University — the result of a 2004 merger involving the former Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education — was racist and was not transforming adequately. UFS management cancelled Friday’s other intervarsity games (men’s and women’s hockey), and obtained an urgent order that evening from the Bloemfontein High Court preventing Sasco and others from disrupting any intervarsity matches, destroying property and molesting people.
And what did my own experience of an entirely pleasant finale to the intervarsity encounters suggest? That tensions and hostility among 8 000 black and white UFS and Pukke students had been suppressed by a court order? That the trio who absorbed me for a while were feigning intimacy either because of a legal decree or because the eye of a journalist they did not know was there was on them?
No. What the experience did suggest to me is that there is more going on at UFS than any number of Reitz videos or media headlines can capture — and more going on, too, than the higher purpose Sasco presumably believes it is serving by preventing 18-year-old women from playing netball.
One clue as to what those untold stories might involve was in the Kovsies FM radio show I heard as I drove to Shimlapark that Saturday. The student presenters in the studio switched several times during my 15-minute drive to their colleagues at the stadium I was heading for.
Their light-hearted interchanges covered what was happening at the stadium — the national anthem was being sung, cheerleaders were enthusing the crowd, names spotted in the stands were mentioned (the presence of “the rector” — vice-chancellor Jonathan Jansen — was especially remarked).
What the radio broadcast expressed was amplified by my experience at the stadium itself — queuing with students for tickets, hearing their good-natured exchanges with students from the opposition (Pukke, not Sasco), seeing their portable braais and the impressive quantities of alcohol, apparently for what promised to be a post-match thrash of note: these were young people pleased, excited and proud to be where they were.
These are among the stories that make up the diverse realities of a university transforming — academically, socially, politically — as the rest of South Africa is doing, with pain and optimism, fear and enthusiasm while trying to cope with the ordinary pressures of daily living.
It is certainly the case that my two days in Bloemfontein on UFS’s intervarsity weekend, and a couple of hours at the main rugby match of the occasion, do not capture the whole reality of UFS. They assuredly do not wipe out the memories, or reduce the significance, of the racism the Reitz video revealed.
Nor has this recent visit of mine made me forget the seven black students who spoke to me for more than an hour on the UFS campus in October last year — on the day of Jansen’s inauguration.
Preoccupied, as all students are, with tests just written and with how they would spend the weekend (this was a Friday; tequila and pizza were mentioned), they also told me that while they felt no hostility towards their white fellow students they never mixed with them nor felt invited to do so. Yet they also felt no identification with Sasco or campus politics generally.
Their stories are as much part of the UFS reality as those that hit the headlines or those of the Shimlapark trio.
But where are these stories being told? Watch this space.
David Macfarlane is the Mail & Guardian’s education editor