South African political and civil society leaders on Wednesday condemned a racist video made at the University of the Free State showing four students humiliating black workers, including serving them food on which one student had urinated, according to dpa. The video, which surfaced Tuesday according to university authorities, was apparently recorded by a group of white male students in September in reaction to a move to create multi-racial student hostels. In the video one student is seeing urinating on food before serving it to five unsuspecting cleaning staff - four women and a man - to hoots of laughter from his friends, university spokeswoman Lacea Loader confirmed. The workers were also given alcohol to drink, told to run a race and play rugby in the video, which the university said was made by occupants of a male hostel, apparently as part of an assignment. The video ends with one of the women washing the dishes with the words "That, at the end of the day, is what we think of integration" in Afrikaans across the screen. The university's vice-chancellor Frederick Fourie condemned the video as a gross violation of the workers' dignity and said the university would press charges against the students concerned. Two of the four students have already completed their studies. The university was taking steps to suspend the other two, he said. Fourie said the workers filmed in the video were "traumatised" on realizing they had been unwittingly partaken in. He also admitted the university in the notoriously conservative province was "going through a difficult time" with multi-racial accommodation. Students at the university last week rioted over the issue, causing millions of rands in damage. On Wednesday hundreds of students, workers and staff came together for a protest march over the video. The South Africa Students' Congress, the African National Congress Youth League, two opposition parties and teachers' unions have all condemned the students' actions as "barbaric" while the South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR) warned the video would do "great damage" to post-apartheid reconciliation. SAIRR deputy head Frans Cronje, in remarks carried by SAPA news agency, referred to two other incidents over the past month as raising concerns for race relations. In one, a young white man opened fire on black township dwellers, in North-West province in January, allegedly killing four people in an apparently unprovoked attack. In the second, white journalists in Johannesburg were excluded from an off-the-record briefing for black journalists given by ANC president Jacob Zuma. The Forum for Black Journalists which organized the briefing defended the decision to exclude white journalists by claiming white and black journanists in South Africa had diverging interests.
