heid, an outward success story.

The Free State, a province of huge Montana skies

and dust and cattle, got its name from early Afrikaner settlers who left Cape T
own to set up their independent nation, and the university, located in the regio
nal capital of Bloemfontein, didn t enroll its first black undergraduate until 198
8. But, by 1992, the number of black students had begun to double every year, an
d, soon, the school was winning a reputation for successfully navigating the pos
t-apartheid world. Everybody else was talking about us, that we were dealing with
race so well, says Billyboy Ramahlele, a black liberation activist who joined th
e senior staff in 1994 and is now UFS s diversity director. Blacks began to move i
nto the white dorms en masse, and Ramahlele designed a student parliament to giv
e the students a chance to practice the techniques of multiracial cooperative se
lf-governance. Mandela came to campus to declare UFS the very model of post-raci
al transformation.
But, behind the scenes, the students were finding it harder and harder to live t
ogether. In one dorm, residents hammered up plywood between black and white corr
idors and labeled it emergency exit. By the turn of the millennium, the dorms had
become completely segregated. Sometimes, administrators called them cultural hous
es, but even they knew they were kidding themselves. The emergence of the Reitz v
ideo seemed to represent the culmination of a slow backward slide.
To reboot, the UFS council hired the first black person to lead the campus, a Ca
pe Town-born academic named Jonathan Jansen. On a sunny Friday afternoon last Oc
tober, Jansen was inaugurated in a ceremony full of cathartic symbolism. A digni
tary swaddled him in the traditional cone-shaped hat and colorful w