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The Black Lawyers Association has noted with disgust the events surrounding the humiliation of a black student by white student and condemns the incident in the strongest possible terms.

As a non-racial and non-sexist civil society organisation, the Black Lawyers Association (BLA) calls upon the University to speed up the investigation of the incident and conduct a thorough and transparent process of investigation and take all reasonable measures to ensure that in the event the perpetrator is found guilty, which is likely, he is expelled from institution with immediate effect and is barred from entering any tertiary institution in South Africa for a long period of time.

The BLA is not surprised by the incident, what surprises us is that this incident occurs in an institution which has always assured South Africans that it is changing for the better. Clearly, the institution has not done nearly enough to ensure that the institution is a safe centre of scholarship and production of new knowledge where all are welcome to be prepared and moulded to help our country grow both socially and economically.

We call on all white parents to teach their children the values of common nationhood that are represented in our constitution and to always keep them at check to ensure that they do not fall into bad and racist influences of their peers.

We further call on the Ministry of Higher Education to ensure that institutions like Stellenbosch University that have in the past been bastions of Afrikaner domination are closely monitored to ensure that they put in place genuine programs to teach cultural diversity and the values of the constitution and ensure that this linked to clear milestones and outcomes.

We further call on the government to criminalise hate crimes of racism and to set up units with specialist knowledge in the investigation of such crimes. Black South Africans are shot at every day and often the excuse is that they look like all sorts of wild animals. It is time that those white South Africans who feel that they have no stake in the construction of a new open and non-racial society renounce their South African citizenship and leave us to clean the mess they have created and benefited from for the past three hundred years. After twenty-eight years of a non-racial constitution, it is necessary that drastic measures are taken to put the demon of institutional racism to its final and fitting death bed.

The BLA is in the process of contacting the family to ensure that they have all the necessary legal support and advice regarding any legal issues pertaining to this matter.

Issued by Black Lawyers Association