A student who failed in his legal battle to wriggle out of a “Nazi” poster controversy at Stellenbosch University that led to his expulsion says he has lost faith in the justice system.
Dean Dart, 26, was one of three students who faced disciplinary action for their role in an incident nearly four years ago.
In May 2017, posters inviting “the Anglo-Afrikaner Student” to a meeting of the “New Right” and to “Fight for Stellenbosch” appeared on campus. They resembled Hitler Youth recruitment posters.
Another was “reminiscent of anticommunist propaganda of the 1970s Chilean military junta” that “depicted a person falling from a helicopter with the tagline ‘Commies Deserve Free Helicopter Rides’ also containing an internet meme known as ‘Pepe the Frog’, said to denote satire”, according to a high court judgment this month.
The students were ordered to perform 100 hours of community service, including 50 hours in the university transformation office and 10 hours in the equality unit.
They also had to complete an assignment “of which the key aspect must be on how to constructively engage on campus and address different narratives”. Failure to comply would result in immediate expulsion.
Dart appealed, but the appeal committee said he should be expelled. He sued Stellenbosch University in the high court in Cape Town, which dismissed his application this month.
This week, Dart released a detailed statement about his battle to clear his name. He said he would not appeal.
“Since the saga underlying the case started in May 2017, and more particularly since the internal disciplinary steps against me and initially two other students of Stellenbosch University started, I have never had money to pay for legal representation in the matter,” said Dart.
“I also want to thank the wonderful people who I have not even met, who donated money to cover some other legal expenses.”
Having examined acting judge Hanri Loots’s judgment, said Dart, he was disillusioned by the way the internal disciplinary bodies of the Stellenbosch University and acting judge Loots dealt with “what my legal team and I regarded as the most important oral and documentary evidence which had been submitted at the internal disciplinary hearings and presented to acting judge Loots in the review application”.
“The charges of which the other two students and I were found guilty and sanctioned for, arose from the interpretation of three posters which were erected on the university campus of Stellenbosch University on 8 May 2017.
“The two posters depicting a white young man and a young white girl respectively, were labelled by both the central disciplinary committee and the disciplinary appeal committee of the university as ‘Nazi posters’.”
Dart criticised the head of Stellenbosch University’s equity unit who testified during the central disciplinary committee hearing. He said the official “initially recommended our preliminary suspension to the rector because he believed ‘that the posters and the advertised meeting on the posters promoted racial polarisation and highly offensive references to Nazi propaganda and neo-Nazism’”.
Dart said the official admitted under cross-examination by counsel that “if a person simply looked at the two posters with the persons depicted on them, one cannot see any reference to ‘Nazi’ Germany or ‘Nazism’.
“He had only made the allegation that the relevant posters had a ‘Nazi’ connotation because he had been shown other images on social media as well as by a lecturer, which images provided a ‘Nazi’ connotation,” said Dart’s statement.
“It is common cause that those images depicted the same persons as in the posters, but with different wording, flag and emblem.”
Regarding the third poster, he said: “My defence, as well as the defence of the two other students, was that the poster signified our abhorrence of what is well-known in past and contemporary history as the world’s most racist, brutal and destructive political system, namely communism.
“Yet by inserting a meme called ‘Pepe the Frog’ on the poster, we clearly conveyed to the reasonable reader that the sketch indicating that communists deserve being thrown from a helicopter was meant as satire and not literally.”
He said the central disciplinary committee received no evidence contradicting their “clear intention with the meme to indicate that the images on the poster were intended as satire”, but “merely” found that the third poster was “highly insensitive”.
“I do not have the financial means to continue with litigation in this matter. I maintain my innocence of the charges against me. I feel that I have in more than three years not received justice in this matter from the internal disciplinary bodies of Stellenbosch University or the high court. "
Stellenbosch University welcomed the judgment, and spokesperson Martin Viljoen said: “It is confirmation of the university’s student disciplinary processes being correct and fair.
“In accordance with its own policies and commitment to the constitution of SA and while striving to be a diverse and inclusive institution, Stellenbosch University condemns racism, racial superiority and unfair discrimination as well as any attempt to polarise the campus in the strongest possible terms.”
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