JOHANNESBURG: Students and staff at a South African university picketed on Wednesday after the surfacing of a video, widely condemned as racist, of black workers made to perform degrading acts by white students.

The home-made film, described as “shocking and disgusting”, came to light on Tuesday and shows five laughing black workers taking part in a number of rituals, including eating meat that had been urinated on.

University of the Free State spokesman Anton Fisher said the workers appeared to have been duped into participating in the video.

“They obviously got the workers to participate under false pretence, something innocuous, and when it was put together it was not what they told the workers.”

An accompanying narrative in Afrikaans indicates the recording was made in protest against a new University of the Free State integration policy that would see black and white students mix more in residences.

“Once upon a time the boere’ (Afrikaners) lived peacefully here on Reitz Island, until one day when the less-advantaged discovered the word integration’ in the dictionary,” a resident of the exclusively white Reitz men’s hostel states on the tape.—AFP