Qwabe is far more privileged than me: bullied waitress
Ashleigh Schultz, the waitress who was bullied by Rhodes Must Fall activist Ntokozo Qwabe, has told the Sunday Times that she will not charge the Rhodes scholar with racism.
Qwabe bragged last week on Facebook about the way he treated 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.”
“I think Oxford should discipline him,” Schultz told the Sunday Times in an exclusive interview.
“Revoking his scholarship is not going to help. But I do think the university should have a word with him. Oxford isn’t a place where racists from South Africa are fit to go. It’s a privilege to be there. He is far more privileged than me. He’s at Oxford and I can’t afford to study and then I get harassed.”
“But he doesn’t deserve to lose everything for … for being a little bit of an idiot,” she said.
Schultz explained why she was brought to tears. “What made me cry was the fact that someone could be so rude without understanding somebody else’s circumstances. I can understand protests and aiming at political figures and stuff like that. But you can’t go into a restaurant and demand your land back. I have got nothing to do with this.”
“I was down to my last R10, I had to move out of my place because I hadn’t earned enough to cover even half my rent and I had nowhere to stay. My mom was having chemo and is struggling financially. The incident was just the last straw. It was already beyond freak-out.”
A petition, signed by at least 40,000 people, was delivered to the vice-chancellor of Oxford University, Louise Richardson, to revoke Ntokozo Qwabe’s Rhodes scholarship, ‘or at the very least, initiate disciplinary action for his recent cowardly and disrespectful behaviour displayed towards a working class female citizen in a Cape Town cafe’.
Following the incident, two separate online campaigns were initiated to raise money for the waitress, purportedly in a show of solidarity against racism and bullying. Both campaigns generated a substantial amount for Schultz, approaching R150,000.
Qwabe is the co-founder of Rhodes Must Fall In Oxford – “an organisation determined to decolonise the space, the curriculum, and the institutional memory at, and to fight inter-sectional oppression within, Oxford”.
He is a former law student at KwaZulu-Natal, and received the Rhodes Scholarship to further his studies at England’s Oxford University, in 2013.
A spokesman for Oxford told TimesLive that the university encouraged freedom of speech, however offensive it might be.
“Our duty of care to all members of the university means we do not discuss individuals. Oxford is a place where non-violent speech, however objectionable, can be expressed and challenged. Our students may voice opinions which others believe to be misguided or which they find offensive. They have a right to do this, but in exercising it we expect them to respect other people and the law.”
The full article can be found in the 8 May 2016 edition of the Sunday Times.
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Rhodes Must Fall leader tells waiter: ‘We will give tip when you return land’
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