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Despite widespread condemnation, the firebrand student and SRC president at Wits University is unrepentant for saying he loves Hitler
Mcebo Freedom Dlamini doesn’t only love Adolf Hitler, he loves the ANC and equal education opportunities too. And the president of Wits University’s Students’ Representative Council (SRC) is not backing down.
Sitting on his neatly made single bed in his room on the second floor of the Wits Junction residence, the man in the grey Steve Biko T-shirt says it’s been a hectic week.
His post on Facebook has sparked condemnation and some admiration. It read: “I love Adolf Hitler ... There is an element of Hitler in every white person.”
But the 29-year-old postgraduate Bachelor of Law student insists he won’t retract it.
“My comment that I love Adolf Hitler was a comment on someone else’s status saying that ‘White people hate Adolf Hitler, yet they are doing what he is doing’ and I wrote ‘I love Adolf Hitler’. And once it was put out there, I had to stand up for my beliefs and my views.”
The Swazi-born firebrand sees nothing wrong with his statement.
“If white people can say they love [apartheid prime minister DF] Malan, [prime minister BJ] Vorster, [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu and Jan van Riebeeck, then I should also be allowed to say I love Hitler,” he says.
Just two months ago, Dlamini and his fellow SRC members were hailed as heroes for raising more than R1 million in three weeks for poor students who could not afford to register at the institution.
“The Hitler stance was to expose the hypocrisy in the white community and to show a black man that white people never loved us and they still view us as second-rate citizens,” he says.
“We were forced to forgive white people in 1994 after all they had done to us and Africa as a whole. What is stopping the Jews from forgiving Hitler 75 years after the Holocaust?”
Dlamini says his view of Hitler came from his history teacher at school, who drilled into pupils that the German dictator was a good orator. “Those are good qualities and those are some that I choose. Why should I be crucified for that?”
He won’t say whether or not he would idolise other dictators with similar qualities.
“I will not be pushed to such a level where I must choose which coloniser is better than the other. I am not ignorant of the atrocities Hitler committed. He was a freak of nature.”
It’s perhaps not ironic then that Dlamini himself is a good orator. The passion with which he speaks commands his audience’s attention, and glosses over any flaws in his argument.
Other than the fact that he was raised in White River, Mpumalanga, and in Soweto, Dlamini declines to reveal where he went to school, saying he does not want to drag his parents, whom he admits are worried about his safety, into the issue.
He also refuses to be drawn into discussing the steps the university will take against him.
Vice-chancellor Adam Habib released a statement this week saying that Wits would look into charging Dlamini for his comments made last weekend.
“I am a student and a leader at this university, and whatever decision Adam Habib takes, he must also consider the consequences ... You can’t recall a sitting president and think things are going to run smoothly. There will be consequences,” says Dlamini.
“There are those who feel offended by what I said, but they are in the minority. There are those who feel fully represented by my response.”
While other students have posters of famous actors and musicians on their walls, Dlamini has ANC hats, ANC kangas and a poster of former president Nelson Mandela, whom he professes not to like much.
He would have preferred his comments to have sparked a discussion around issues of poverty and white supremacy, which he says continue to oppress the black child. But this hasn’t happened.
“Where are the black academics to interpret the pregnant statement I made? I am throwing this to them and they need to analyse this. It’s their role.”
This is not the first time Dlamini has been in trouble at the university. Last year he was charged with assaulting a fellow student.
But he insists they have forgiven each other and the university only instituted charges against him after he was elected.
This, he says, was a means to silence him as the “nuisance within the university. Now I have become the nuisance outside the university.”
Dlamini, who has an undergraduate degree in politics, describes himself as a “nobody from Soweto” who grew up during the struggle, one who has always been a political person because of the conditions he grew up in.
“The Holocaust happened [more than] 75 years ago and they received billions of dollars in repatriations [sic]. There have never been any repatriations [sic] for the black holocaust, which is still happening today.
“But we have to keep quiet, or we are [labelled] racist and anti-Semitic.”
