Steerpike readers will be familiar with the antics of Ntokozo Qwabe — the Rhodes scholar, who boasted about making a waitress shed ‘white tears’ after he asked her to ‘return the land’. While the Oxford’s Rhodes Must Fall co-founder has since completed his law studies in Britain and returned to South Africa — where he has been interrupting lectures with a large stick — a new Rhodes scholar is on the way.
Like Qwabe, Joshua Nott has decided to accept a £40,000 scholarship from the Rhodes Trust despite being actively involved in the Rhodes Must Fall movement, which campaigned to have a statue of Cecil Rhodes — the British mining magnate — removed from Cape Town University on the grounds that it symbolised racism and colonialism.
Defending his decision to accept the scholarship, Nott — who compared the statue to ‘a swastika in Jerusalem’ — said he was no a hypocrite as he would use the ‘Rhodes scholarship to defeat the very ideals of what it originally stood for’.
Britain’s best politics newsletters
You get two free articles each week when you sign up to The Spectator’s emails.
Already a subscriber? Log in
Comments
Join the debate, free for a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first month free.
UNLOCK ACCESS Try a month freeAlready a subscriber? Log in