This is the story of how white supremacy is so deeply entrenched at an Afrikaans university, that young people see nothing wrong with posting photos of themselves doing the Nazi salute on social media.

The photo posted in 2015 on the Facebook profile of a former student of the North-West University in Potchefstroom who is now a guest lecturer in Academic Literacy at the same university.

I recently discovered Facebook’s hidden “filtered requests” message Inbox and was blown away by a mountain of hate mail from the past two years. It was déjà vu overload because I’d blocked out the dread that takes hold of you when you open one message after the other spewing hate and even death threats.

One message stood out, because I remember the sender as a student from when I was a journalism lecturer at North-West University (NWU) in Potchefstroom three years ago. I looked at her Facebook profile where I learnt that she is now a guest lecturer in Academic Literacy at the NWU. I noticed a photo that explained the message she’d sent me on 13 November last year in which she said ‘your facist (sic) liberalism will never take away our God or our language’.

The photo was posted on 27 May 2015, seemingly at a wedding. She’s standing next to a group of smiling young people who are all doing the Nazi ‘Sieg Heil’ salute. We are not friends on Facebook so if I could see this photo, anybody could see it. If it was meant as a joke, it still had a very malicious subtext. These youngsters have probably been making the salute as students in Potchefstroom’s overwhelmingly white Afrikaans student residences — accompanied by the ‘Heil Puk!’ cry — for many years.

Given the regressive context of that campus (think of it as the Donald Trump of higher education) there was a possibility that before 2014 some ignorant students really didn’t know the meaning or origin of the salute. But after an exposé in Beeld, an Afrikaans newspaper, in February 2014 there could be no more excuses. It came to light (and was later confirmed by the Wessels Report) that the ‘Heil Puk’ salute was just one aspect of a student culture that was so openly militaristic it would make the father of apartheid, Hendrik Verwoerd, blush.

A collage showing various aspects of the res culture at the North-West University’s Potchefstroom campus (Puk) from 2011 to 2013. As a result of the Nazi salute controversy all initiation rituals for first year students were banned in 2014.

While I do believe this particular person should be held accountable for sharing such a repulsive image, I don’t really blame her. She is a victim of a culture on the Potchefstroom campus that was actively encouraged and supported by management. The reason that naïve young Afrikaans people think it’s still acceptable to do the Nazi salute in public and post a photo of it on social media, is because those in management who should have guided them about how offensive it really is, have failed them.

The video image the vice-chancellor Theuns Eloff and rector Herman van Schalkwyk claimed was taken out of context to deliberately discredit the North-West University.

After Beeld’s exposé in 2014 the former vice-chancellor Theuns Eloff and rector Herman van Schalkwyk used every opportunity they had to dismiss the evidence of the Nazi salute as an “isolated” incident. They claimed it was a screen grab from a video of an innocent student dance that was sensationalised by enemies of Afrikaners to discredit the university. They knew exactly how widespread the use of the ‘Heil Puk’ salute was in student residences, but they downplayed it and encouraged students to see themselves as victims of an attack by outside forces to destroy their precious white “campus culture”. Through a massively successful propaganda campaign aided by rightwing organisations such as AfriForum and Solidariteit as well as the Afrikaans newspaper Rapport, they convinced students they were actually being persecuted for being white, Afrikaans and Christian.

What should have given rise to a debate about a sick campus culture that deliberately excluded students from other cultures and races in a country with a shameful apartheid past was shrewdly turned into a political “language debate”. Soon the constitution was dragged in to justify Afrikaans students’ inalienable right to tertiary education in their mother tongue — and the powerful cult of white victimhood took over. Only those who have had experience of the inner workings of this cult know what lies behind the charade about language rights and noble constitutional principles.

The Potchefstroom campus still is a bastion of white privilege and one of the last breeding grounds of the kind of apartheid mentality the dominant white economy requires in South Africa. The fascist res culture creates cowed conformists that are so obsessed with their own culture and language, they soon become the worst kind of blinkered chauvinists. Management has given rightwing organisations such a solid stronghold on the Potchefstroom campus that the leader of AfriForum Youth became SRC president last year.

Before I accepted a position at NWU in 2012, I was unaware that this state-funded university was actually still operating as an apartheid institution. I also didn’t know what had happened to lecturers and staff members who dared to question this hegemony. After two years of trying to challenge the toxic res culture and being openly critical of how untransformed the campus was, my time was up. The director of the marketing and communications department asked student residence managers to lay charges against me for damaging the university’s good name by being critical of initiation practices on social media. Students were also encouraged to lay false charges so that management could initiate a disciplinary process.

By then I had seen enough evidence of the extreme measures management would take to destroy their critics, so I decided to leave before I was fired. Like so many troublemakers before me I was offered a financial settlement to quietly turn my back on what I’ve witnessed. The timing of my departure suited management because it coincided with the exposé about the Nazi salute and I was the perfect scapegoat — they claimed the revelations were made by a bitter former employee who had used her media connections to get back at the university.

Shortly after the exposé of the Nazi salute the conservative economist Mike Schussler discredited the report by claiming the whistleblower was a disgruntled former employee who had lied about her qualifications and abused her friendship with an editor to get back at the North-West University.

The hate mail I received was fuelled by another falsehood spread by university authorities: That I had lied about my qualifications before I started working at NWU. I was stunned to read about this on the Facebook wall of a well-known Afrikaans economist whom I didn’t know from a bar of soap, Mike Schussler. Only later did it make sense when I realised that he is the biggest champion of white economic interests in South Africa, with strong connections to rightwing organisations. There was a good reason why Schussler had to discredit claims of a fascist culture at the university that most effectively feeds the white economy.

Since I left the NWU two years ago, I’m glad to report a lot has changed on the Potchefstroom campus. The transformation process has been given momentum by a black chancellor, Prof. Dan Kgwadi. But it hasn’t been easy. Prof. Kgwadi has been vilified by the rightwing faction on campus and the former vice-chancellor Theuns Eloff has used the media to undermine his successor’s credibility whenever he gets the chance. It is still an open question whether Prof. Kgwadi will be allowed to lead the NWU to become a truly transformed university. He is up against a very powerful, almost untouchable, group of people.

I have no doubt the photograph of young white people doing the Nazi salute is meant as a big FUCK YOU to those who dare challenge white privilege in a country where — after 22 years of democracy — apartheid is still a reality for most people. There are still enough rewards for this kind of white supremacist attitude to not have to fear a backlash. After all, not a single student has been punished for making the salute. These young people are certain they will have jobs in future — even at the very same university where this salute was shown to be part of a problematic culture. They know history still favours them.