Rhodes must fall activist controversy

The activist behind the Rhodes Must Fall campaign, Ntokozo Qwabe, was captured on film allegedly using a stick to knock a mobile phone out of a student’s hand at a protest in South Africa.

The incident occurred at the University of Cape Town, where activists were protesting against a rise in tuition fees for South African universities.

A video that was captured shows Qwabe and other protesters objecting to being filmed, leading him to knock the phone out of the student’s hand. The video was later posted online.

In a passionate Facebook response to the video, Qwabe wrote “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 had actually not been a good, law abiding citizen and whipped the white apartheid settler colonial entitlement out of the bastard— who continued to record us without our consent—this is not what happened as the media is reporting.”

Protests took place across South Africa’s Universities following the announcement made by the country’s Education Minister that Universities would be allowed to individually decide how much will be paid to them. 31 students of Johannesburg’s Witwatersrand University were arrested after clashing with police over the same issue. The protests led to classes being suspended for the day at The University of Cape Town.

Ntokozo Qwabe previously led an unsuccessful campaign that called for the removal of a statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College, Oxford University. The calls were made for the removal of the statue as a result of Rhode’s controversial colonial past, which protesting students argued should not be celebrated.

Qwabe’s name has featured in several news articles since the Rhodes Must Fall campaign. In December last year, The Daily Telegraph found out the activist was on a scholarship to the University set up by the colonialist Rhodes himself. While critics called this “disgraceful hypocrisy”, Qwabe retorted that he wasn’t a beneficiary of Rhodes money and that he was simply taking back “tiny fractions” of what Rhodes looted during his time in Africa.

Another incident involved Qwabe making waitress Ashleigh Shultz cry, as he described, “white tears”, when he told her that he would pay a tip when “fellow white people” returned South Africa’s land to its black population.