The black Rhodes scholar, a crying white waitress and a lesson in blind prejudice

May 2, 2016 by

by Dominic Lawson, Mailonline:

Does the name Ntokozo Qwabe ring a bell? Let me refresh your memory: he is one of the leaders of the Rhodes Must Fall movement, which called for the statue of Cecil Rhodes to be removed from the facade of Oriel College, Oxford, on the grounds it was upsetting to ethnic minority students to be confronted by a monument to the 19th-century colonialist.

It then emerged Mr Qwabe’s own place at Oxford is as a Rhodes Scholar, funded by a bequest from that very same imperialist. He became, according to one report, ‘visibly angry’ when the academic Mary Beard said: ‘You can’t whitewash Rhodes out of history but go on using his cash.’

The formidable Professor Beard can look after herself. Less so could a waitress when confronted by Qwabe’s particular brand of angry self-righteousness.

As the Mail reported on Saturday, this young woman — serving in a restaurant in the Western Cape — was reduced to tears when Qwabe and his dining companion wrote on the bill that they would give her a tip only ‘when you return the land’.

He presumably meant this white South African and all others of her kin should give up their homes and leave the country, since at a governmental level it is already under the control of the African National Congress.

Unsurprisingly, the waitress at the Obz Cafe was shaken by this, a fact that amused Mr Qwabe. He wrote on Facebook that he had been ‘unable to stop smiling because something so black and wonderful had happened . . . she sees the note and starts shaking. She leaves us and bursts into typical white tears’.

He went on to say that a white male waiter approached the table to ‘annoy us more with his own white tears telling us that he finds our act racist’.

If you imagine that this had instead been a scene in which the customer was a white student at one of the world’s wealthiest universities and the waiter was a black woman on the minimum wage, and the non-tipping diner had referred to ‘typical black tears’, you can appreciate that the charge of racism levelled against Qwabe is appropriate.

Read also: Rhodes Must Fall activists have become the very thing they hate by Candice Holdsworth, Spectator

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