I thought I’d tell you all about an experience I’m currently going through in a series of university lectures I have to attend.

I work for a financial institution. But the subdivision of it that I work in has 1,500 employees – most of whom are non-white. Our management got the brainwave that all employees must go on a compulsory university course which comprises 4 lectures on saturdays for a month.

You can imagine how upset I was by this because of my website. As it is I use most of my non-work time to work on my website or to post news articles. So losing out on 4 saturdays irritated me tremendously – to the point where I even had visions of resigning from my job if I could. But I have no other source of income so that is unrealistic. In the end I just had no choice and bit the bullet and enrolled on the course.

So all 1,500 of us have to go on this series of legal lectures because our superiors believe this will all help us in our jobs. So they arranged for 4 sets of courses 3 months apart. I have gone on the 3rd course which started yesterday at a major University here in Johannesburg!

Note: This is university level material – but it is not a lot. In total, the course has 73 pages of notes.

What was interesting though, has been hearing more and more stories coming out from my fellow white employees about these courses.

I heard that in the first course they did there was so much cheating that they forced ALL the employees to rewrite the exam a 2nd time!

A woman I spoke to on friday at work told me that she was on the last course where there was a lot of cheating too. She did not say “blacks” … we were chatting in our pause area at work but she said “them” and looked in their direction. She said “they have no self-respect”. She went on to say that she saw people passing crib notes and papers to each other and SMS’ing each other via cell phone during the exams. Another co-worker told me that in one of the exams they went around gathering up people’s cell phones, etc because there was so much cheating.

I heard that in the last exam – only 32% of the company’s employees passed! (These exams don’t have much bearing on me because I am in the computer dept – but for most of the company’s employees they are relevant to their job and they should even know some of this legal stuff already because of their work). So I think such a high failure rate is going to be a shocking result for the company’s senior executives!!

Now if only 32% of the employees passed the 2 hour exam… then I wonder what the percentages are by RACE – because about 1/3rd or less of our employees are white.

When I went to the first lecture yesterday, I saw that most of our class was black. I’d say that in our class, only about 20% of us are white. We arrived on time and the latest that whites arrived up was 10 minutes after starting time. But I saw blacks coming to the course an hour after we had started. One person arrived 1 1/2 hours after the lecture had begun.

The course will unhappily mess my weekends up for all of November. But I’ll use it to watch how everyone performs. Our employer even gives us a whole day off to study before we write the exam.

I must tell you the funniest thing I saw when I was there. We all had to sign the register to show that we attended the course. And there, on this register of this most noted University was a column marked “Race”. No doubt our employer and the university had put this column in there. Next to my name it said “white”. I smiled as I browsed through it and saw the different races: “White, black, coloured, Indian”.

So here we are in 2006, in “non-racist” South Africa… and everyone is still faithfully employing the definitions of RACE as defined under Apartheid! No question about it. We are not employing “ANC” and the current LEGAL definition of race which is: White and Black. The ANC definition of race is white, and everyone who is not white is regarded as black. That is how it is defined in the constitution. But… instead… everyone, to this day still uses the “Apartheid Definition of Race” – why? Because it has the most value. It is more specific and natural and everyone knows it off by heart.

Even hardcore ANC supporters still talk in terms of Apartheid’s race structure i.e. black, coloured, etc. I heard a coloured woman at work talking about “there are two types of coloureds… you get the real trailer-trash coloured and then you get the better class of coloured…” This from the mouth of a 100% ANC supporting woman. RACE in S.Africa is WELL DEFINED and everyone knows which group they belong to.

Boy… what I wouldn’t give to know the exam pass rates BY RACE!! I’ll bet the university and the company executives know the answers.

What I don’t know is whether RACE is used to ADJUST the exam results! That would P*SS me off. I would not be surprised if that is the case.

But the mere fact that judging by the testimony of other co-workers – that the blacks need to cheat so much – tells me that they must be failing on a massive scale and I wonder how much of their passing is dependent on their crib notes?

Yet… they get paid the same money as we do…

But that’s not the worst of it. I must tell you something I saw at my work that just disgusted me and shows me what a complete farce this whole country runs on. It has to do with our quarterly performance appraisals. I am busy enforcing certain standards in my department… and I heard one of my superiors mentioning the one day that during appraisals… most people get rated “above average”. I nearly fell on my back. We have a lot of “deadwood” in our department so this is clearly not correct. That is most definitely not a true reflection of skills. It showed me once more that we’re living in two different worlds and I am sure that underneath it… people of different races are held to different standards. There is no such thing as FAIRNESS… neither in academic circles, nor even in our jobs. It leaves me disgusted. The many are carried by the few. But why doesn’t this surprise me?

I must tell you, many whites know this, and deep down in our hearts we resent the situation. I have had many discussions with whites and I can see that virtually everyone knows it, and deep down they harbour resentment because of it. I am sure this is happening all over S.Africa. I have no doubt about that.

My white co-workers are irritated by the fact that the thought of cheating never enters our minds and we will play the game by the book while the blacks will cheat and many will get away with it. I was saying to them that if we are in the exam and we see people cheating we should inform the examiners. I am sure as hell not going to waste my time and rewrite exams and have results nullified because of some black schmucks who can’t make the grade. Jan