The court battle between Rhodes University and Yolanda Dyantyi – a student it expelled for being part of a violent campus protest against ‘rape culture’ at the Makhanda institution – is on hold for now.

A Daily Dispatch report says in April 2018, Dyantyi was kicked out after the university found her guilty of kidnapping, assault, defamation and insubordination.

Last year, she asked the Eastern Cape High Court (Grahamstown) to overturn her expulsion. But the university asked Judge Nomathamsanqa Beshe to put the case on hold until Dyantyi paid costs orders from two earlier cases. It asked Beshe to force Dyantyi to put up security of R250 000 before her case could go ahead.

But Beshe said that if she agreed to do so, she would be denying Dyantyi her right of access to the court. The decision meant argument could go ahead last month in front of the Deputy Judge President of the Eastern Cape High Court, Zamani Nhlangulela.

Dyantyi’s legal team argued that the university had ‘determined to prosecute, convict and expel her, come what may’.

Susan Smailes, legal adviser to the university’s vice-chancellor, said in papers before court that the university had a duty to regulate student behaviour. She described the rape culture protests as ‘vigilantism’, saying they ‘consisted of very serious acts of criminal activity, including kidnapping, assault, humiliation, threatening and taunting of several male students’.

Smailes accused Dyantyi of ‘unreasonably and self-servingly’ downplaying her part in the criminal conduct. She added that Dyantyi ‘consistently sought to mislead the court’ by creating the idea that the protest was nothing but a picket outside a residence during which three men were confronted.

‘(Dyantyi) demonstrated a propensity to unbridled violence, to disregard and treat with disdain the rules of the university and the country and the fundamental rights of students,’ she said.

The report notes Nhlangulela reserved judgment.

Full Daily Dispatch report (subscription needed)