Oxford’s Rhodes Must Fall co-founder in hot water again – ‘I should have whipped that white student’

Earlier this year, Oxford’s Rhodes Must Fall co-founder Ntokozo Qwabe made the news after he revelled in making a waitress shed ‘white tears‘ at a restaurant in Cape Town. The incident occurred after his friend wrote a note to the waitress explaining they would only tip her when she ‘returned the land’. Since then, the Oxford law student has completed his studies in Britain and returned to South Africa.

However, time has not been a healer. Qwabe has hit the headlines in South Africa after he and his fellow activists disrupted a law lecture at the University of Cape Town. Qwabe hit a smartphone out of the hand of a ‘white student’ after the student in question started filming:

@IOL Qwabe, Rhodes scholar former student, intimidates UCT students
hits phn out of filming students hand with stickhttps://t.co/kG6q39Clqk

— Nec consecutio nulla cura (@NecCura) September 20, 2016

In a Facebook post following the event, Qwabe has spoken out to make clear that he did not touch the student with his stick — only his phone. However — given that this is Qwabe — he adds that he wished he had ‘whipped the white apartheid settler colonial entitlement out of the bastard’:

‘It is NOT true that I ‘assaulted’ and ‘whipped with a stick’ a white student during our shutdown of the arrogant UCT Law Faculty yesterday!

Although I wish I’d actually not been a good law abiding citizen & whipped the white apartheid settler colonial entitlement out of the bastard – who continued to video record us without our consent – this is not what happened as the media is reporting.’

He goes on to say that — although it was he who held the stick — he ‘will not be subjected to such white violence’:

‘Otherwise, people must please stop annoying us about this petty non-issue invented by the media. While word has it that the instruction to video record us came from the Dean of Law (a whole womxn of colour!), we are klear that we will not be subjected to such white violence. The violent anthropologising of articulations of black pain without black people’s consent is as old as settler colonial domination itself. We refuse to continue operating under the white gaze!’

No doubt Oxford officials are breathing a sigh of relief that he no longer studies at the university.