Fort Hare deserves better, may the 'cretins' themselves burn in hell

Who burns down a university to protest faulty fire detectors

- Don Makatile

The writer says the arsonists of the University of Fort Hare, which helped shape black history, must hang their collective 'empty head in shame.'

Barney Mthombothi calls them cretins masquerading as students. They are worse than that. They are young criminal minds drunk on entitlement.

It is unfathomable to think that a whole history can be put to fire - not by knife-wielding thugs with no whiff of an education but by “cretins masquerading as students”.

The arsonists of the University of Fort Hare must hang their collective empty head in shame.

Campus politics did not begin with these spoilt brats who rend damage estimated at R500-million with their boxes of matches.

In the 1950s, a man who had no respect for Africans, Dr HF Verwoerd was appointed minister of native affairs. He quickly introduced the Bantu Education Bill through which he assumed control of the schooling of the natives.

In his racist prism, it was pointless to take the native through formal education: “What is the use of teaching a Bantu child mathematics when it cannot use it in practice? Education must train and teach people in accordance with their opportunities in life.”

According to Verwoerd and his ilk, it was unthinkable for the likes of late Dr Thamsanqa Wilkie Khambule and Professor Mamokgethi Phakeng to emerge from the African womb and be so adept at the science of mathematics.