Al-Qalam 
What was first year law student Theuns du Toit who allegedly urinated on fellow student Babalo Ndwayama’s room and on his belongings at Huis Marais Residence at the University of Stellenbosch thinking? Was it in a fit of drunken stupidity that he resurrected the monster that his ancestors created and the injury these past three centuries experienced by people of colour, now classified as blacks?
I’d like to know the answer to those questions as a fact, not speculation, for I was stunned beyond belief that alleged racism on his part should recur five years and five months after the reference by Penny Sparrow in a Facebook post labeling black people as “monkeys” and using the K-words, just after New Year’s Eve in 2016.
Both Theuns and Penny will live with their crimes, yes racism is a crime, as long as people can remember the hurts and humiliations they forcibly had to endure at the behest of Theuns and Penny’s ancestors.
Racism is so wrong but there are those amongst us – and they’re not whites only – who perpetrate and perpetuate this injury to the core, the very soul of the individual.
We, as a collective ought to….correction… ‘we must’ as Thomas Norman De Wolf and Jodie Geddes recommend in their prescient book ‘The Little Book of Racial Healing’ that both the perpetrators and victims must come to ‘the table for truth telling, liberation and transformation ‘if we are to reach the other side that upholds justice and freedom.
Saber Ahmed Jazbhay
Human Rights Lawyer
Newlands West
