A student who helped lead the campaign to tear down a ‘racist’ statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oxford has boasted about refusing to tip a waitress because she was white.
Ntokozo Qwabe bragged online that he and a friend made the woman cry ‘typical white tears’ after writing on the bill ‘we will give tip when you return the land’.
The incident, in a café in South Africa, provoked a fierce backlash from critics who branded him a ‘hypocrite’.
Mr Qwabe, 24, is one of the leaders of the Rhodes Must Fall movement, which campaigned to remove a statue of the 19th Century imperialist from Oriel College.
Although he is a Rhodes scholar himself and received money from the Rhodes’ estate to study at Oxford, Qwabe and other activists claimed forcing ethnic minority students to walk past the statue amounted to ‘violence’.
On Thursday, he wrote on Facebook about an altercation with a waitress during a visit to a restaurant called Obz Café in the Western Cape, South Africa.
He said the incident had left him ‘unable to stop smiling because something so black, wonderful & LIT just happened!’
He wrote that he had eaten there with a friend, described as a ‘radical non-binary trans black activist’, but that the pair had refused to pay the ‘white woman’ waitress a tip.
He said: ‘They take a pen & slip in a note where the gratuity/tip amount is supposed to be entered.
‘The note reads in bold: “WE WILL GIVE TIP WHEN YOU RETURN THE LAND”.
‘The waitress comes to us with a card machine for the bill to be sorted out.
‘She sees the note & starts shaking. She leaves us & bursts into typical white tears (like why are you crying when all we’ve done is make a kind request? lol!).’
He added that she left the table crying and a ‘white male colleague’ then approached the table to ‘annoy us more with his own white tears telling us that he finds our act “racist”.’
He added: ‘Moral of the story: the time has come when no white person will be absolved. We are tired of “not all white people” and all other bulls***. We are here, and we want the stolen land back.
‘No white person will be out here living their best life while we are out here being a landless and dispossessed black mass. NO white person shall rest.
‘It is irrelevant whether you personally have land/wealth or you don’t.
‘Go to your fellow white people & mobilise for them to give us the land back.’
His post went viral on the internet, with critics from around the world hitting out at his apparent prejudice.
Muhammed Habib Banderker wrote: ‘What an absolute fool of a human being this guy is.’
Tim Flack said: ‘Oh big man, so chuffed to make a waitress cry. For someone who has gone through so much hardship in his life, I’m no longer inspired by you.
‘You are not a role model for anyone, you are a hateful human being. There’s my white tears.’
Aaminah Masauso said: ‘Have you ever worked as wait staff? Have you ever had to depend on gratuity to make ends meet?
‘How would you feel if it was a black waitress being subjected to such?’
Riaz Muhammed branded him ‘racist’ and said: ‘You will amount to nothing. Hypocrite.’
Yesterday, Mr Qwabe responded to his critics online by accusing the ‘white media’ of ‘going hysterical’.
He added: ‘One moment of white tears always makes news despite the everyday unarticulated black pain the dispossessed & landless masses of this cowntry have to live through! WOW. Whiteness is so weak. Cute actually.’
Mr Qwabe, a South African masters student, was funded by a Rhodes scholarship during his undergraduate law degree at Keble College.
Last year, Oriel College said it would conduct a ‘listening exercise’ after he and other students campaigned for the Cecil Rhodes statue to come down.
Eventually the college refused their demand after donors threatened to withdraw funding over the reputational damage the row had caused.
Yesterday, the manager of the restaurant, Rush Alexander, confirmed the incident had taken place and said the waitress involved was ‘upset’.
He added: ‘We were very surprised as everyone in Cape Town just gets along. It was racist and it was unjust. However, we don’t think we will take any further action.
‘It was just the words of one ignorant man.’