The surly white students, dressed in their uniform of tight shorts and rugby shirts, gathered at the entrance of the once exclusively white hostel and cast hostile glances at the visitors.

Black students hastened their pace or crossed to the other side of the road as they passed the main entrance of Reitz residence, named after a premier of the Orange Free State, one of the early Boer Republics.

The scene would have been unremarkable two decades ago, when apartheid was in force. But a racial clash has erupted between young white and black students, many of them children when the country's race laws were disbanded 14 years ago.

“We know what they are capable of. There have been many incidents in the past,” Earl Coetzee, a journalist with the campus radio station, said. “At first, we said it is the Reitz lot again and laughed. Then we realised it was more serious.” Yesterday's stand-off came a day after a home-made video showing male Afrikaner students forcing black domestic workers to eat dirty meat and drink soup into which they had urinated outraged South Africa.

Students were back in class when lectures restarted after a violent demonstration outside the hostel on Wednesday. “It is tense here. Not all white students are like that lot but the university is split along racial grounds,” Lize du Plessis, a 20-year-old white student, said.

The video, which was made to protest against moves to integrate blacks and whites in the same residences, shows the students forcing the women cleaners to drink beer and perform athletic tasks. Described as disgusting, it has shocked South Africans across the political spectrum.

It has underlined how little real change has occurred outside the sophisticated bubbles of Cape Town and Johannesburg. It has also damaged the image of the multiracial “Rainbow Nation” since the end of apartheid.

Students and staff on the campus said that the incident, although the most extreme in recent times, was far from unique. “This place is very racist and the Reitz boys are the worst of the lot. There is very little racial harmony here,” said Mpho Motibi, a 23-year-old law student, who complained to the university authorities after some students set dogs on her.

More worryingly, for South Africa as a whole, the divisions on campus reflect the continuing stand-off bordering on open dislike between black and white in largely rural and often poor areas such as the Free State.

Billyboy Ramahlele, director of diversity at the university, said: “This is the real South Africa. That is what has shocked people about what happened here. The tragedy is these white boys don't even think they have done anything wrong.”

He said that many of the white students, many of whom were only 10 when apartheid ended, came from remote areas where their parents paid lip service to the new South Africa. Many accuse the African National Congress of abandoning its early promises of an all-inclusive democracy and feel marginalised by affirmative action programmes while their pleas for action on crime go unanswered.

White students at the campus accuse the blacks of overreacting and making politics out of what was “just a joke”. Black students are outraged that their white counterparts do not condemn the video equivocally.

More clashes are expected as the university accelerates plans for integration among the 25,000 students - 55 per cent of whom are black.

“We condemn the video but we are not going to sit back and have our hostel maligned like this,” Pieter Odenhaal, the head student at Reitz, said.

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