‘I’m not racist – some of my best friends are white’: Ntokozo Qwabe
Student activist Ntokozo Qwabe, who made headlines for allegedly reducing a waitress to tears in a Cape Town restaurant, has delivered his final verdict on the incident.
In a column entitled: ‘The final word on #TipGate and the bullied white waitress’ on the Daily Vox, Qwabe said that he has been called a “racist”, a “criminal”, a “bully”, a “dick”, among other scathing names since the incident.
“On return to Oxford, I was summoned to the office of the Senior Dean at my college – in order to discuss my ‘health and safety within the college, and Oxford more generally’ – following a flow of death threats and safety hazards directed at violating my bodily integrity,” he said.
Read: There was no waitress who was bullied and cried: Qwabe
Qwabe bragged Facebook about the way he and his group of friends treated waitress Ashleigh Schultz at a cafe in Observatory, Cape Town.
Schultz was reportedly reduced to tears after Qwabe’s group of friends wrote on the bill: “We will give tip when you return land.”
Qwabe said he was amazed of how very little of what was reported ‘is based on events as they occurred in actual reality’.
“The media reporting has been riddled with factual inaccuracies, distortions and blatant lies,” he said.
Qwabe denies writing the note, and also refutes claims that Schultz was reduced to tears. He said of the incident:
The act was not “rude”, “spiteful” or a moment of being “a dick” as many have suggested. As activists involved in the student movement, we are not interested in the politics of dickism. We are not dickists. Far from being a reactionary moment of spite, the political act was an outcome of lengthy political discussion the trans black activist and I had been having about what it means to exist in a trans black body in a South Afrikan context where black people are a landless, dispossessed and impoverished mass. As was generously explained to Ashleigh and her colleagues, the note was not about her but about disrupting whiteness in a Cape Town restaurant space that remains largely inaccessible to black people, in a city where filthy white wealth exists alongside depressing black poverty. As I made it explicit in the post that birthed this whole scandal, the act was unambiguously about tabling the issue of land and wealth (which still lie in the hands of a white minority) in that white space – seeing that South Afrika had been celebrating “Freedom Day” just the day before.
“The suggestion that this was a moment of spite directed at “bullying” Ashleigh is as nonsensical as the suggestion that she cried. It would seem that many missed or deliberately ignored the figurative use of the words “crying” and “white tears” to denote the white fragility and discomfort displayed by Ashleigh and her colleagues in response to the political act. It should have been obvious from the post that I used these words figuratively and not literally from my indication that other white people in the restaurant “also annoyed us with their white tears”. Did people really think all these other people in that restaurant were literally crying? Wow! As a matter of fact, Ashleigh did NOT cry.”
On being labeled a racist, Qwabe said: “Firstly, there is no way that I can be “racist” as some of my best friends are white.
“Secondly, one of the ways in which racism entrenches itself in modern society is in the erroneous belief in the myth of black racism against white people – sometimes called ‘reverse racism’.
The activist said that his censorship following the incident has been ‘alarming’.
“Yet again, we have been reminded that there is, in reality, no freedom of speech in a black body – just what (white) people in power allow. It is within this context that I have taken to this platform to air my unedited views and reflections. I feel compelled to set a few things straight about the incident that sparked tipgate.”
Read the full column on the Daily Vox here
More on Ntokozo Qwabe
Qwabe is far more privileged than me: bullied waitress
Oxford University responds to calls to revoke waitress bully’s scholarship
Rhodes Must Fall leader dares whites to have him expelled from Oxford
Rhodes Must Fall leader tells waiter: ‘We will give tip when you return land’
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