BY: Cameron Peters
Hot on the heels of an alleged racist attack in Bloemfontein - an incident which roiled people globally - I would like to remind you that it's imperative that we don't cease to remember a similar incident where white school boys rammed a cleaning device into an ailing black boy's rectum in a small town in the Northern Cape.
The 18-year-old teenager, who perished almost a year after the attack, was brutally assaulted in the dorm of a school hostel in Jan Kempdorp - a town that bears the name of one of the leading advocates of Boer independence, Jan Christoffel Greyling Kemp.
A group of macho-looking school boys forced the victim, who was fighting cancer, to engage in intercourse and oral sex by penetrating him with a broom -- all of this as a cellphone camera recorded it in color and sound.
Reports at the time said Stephan Venter and Zalman Davis, both 19, have admitted guilt on four counts of assault and one of crimen injuria. Another boy, 16, pleaded guilty to two counts of sexual assault.
The fourth accused, a 15-year-old, was acquitted.
This vile memory chronicle the evolution and persistence of racist episodes within schools and among groups of children.
It was 29 degrees Celsius on Christmas day at the Maselspoort Resort, near Bloemfontein, the level of mercury that would normally bring out scores of children to splash in pools and soak up the sun while playing games. Instead, black children had to commemorate Christ's birth by weathering a rather intense race storm.
This colour and sound I mentioned a few paragraphs up would shock not only a nation, but an entire planet. People the world over watched in horror as nearly three decades after the attainment of political freedom, grown men viciously manhandled two youngsters simply for swimming in a resort pool with the wrong skin colour.
News stations from the United States all the way to India rolled a clip that sparked widespread outrage as viewers witnessed the violent, hateful reality: the reality of apartheid being over only in the legislative sense.
For many of us, the video, which ricocheted across the internet, evoked a range of emotions with shock not being one of them.
Mere hours after this colour and sound made its way to the screens of every single smartphone in the world, the social media right wing of South Africa attempted to discredit the obvious, including one user who claimed a three-year old white child was the real cause of the incident - this was later debunked after the New York Times released CCTV footage, showing exactly what happened.
Politicians in the South African government very quickly showed the nation their true colours, including one KwaZulu-Natal mayor who claimed racism is a "distraction". Generations of pain, hurt and suffering reduced to a simple distraction.
Back to the Northern Cape incident: A destitute grave now hold the remains of the 18-year-old victim who is now completely forgotten. If the media and social media had been as proactive in this incident as in the Bloemfontein one the young man with cancer wouldn't have been be a forgotten victim of racism.
I am writing this piece cause I am angry; it was swept under the rug and life simply went on.