Rhodes Scholar Ntokozo Qwabe has defended hitting a smartphone out of the hand of a “white student” during his and some others’ efforts to disrupt a law lecture at the University of Cape Town yesterday. In a Facebook post on the incident – which has received extensive press coverage after a video of it went viral – Qwabe says he did not touch the student with his stick, only his device.
Earlier this year, while still studying at Oxford University, Qwabe made international news by boasting on Facebook about making a working class white waitress cry, while eating out in Observatory, Cape Town.
Qwabe’s full post on the latest incident follows below:
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.
As the video footage klearly shows, we were singing peacefully & waiting for the lecture to be officially called off, and the students to exit the lecture venue - because the Law Faculty had no business continuing with lectures when we had shut down the rest of the university. Contrary to what our delusional toxic superiority complex tells us, we are NOT special as law students! The Law Faculty will continue being shut down like the rest of the university!
Anyways, so, while singing peacefully, the said white student kept video recording us. A black womxn I was with repeatedly asked him nicely to stop recording her. He then turned the camera my way & I asked him nicely to stop. When he refused, I used my protest stick (which I carry around for cultural purposes) to push the phone out of his hand onto the floor. He picked it up & continued to video, at which point I came closer to him & told him to switch it the fuck off. He then kindly put it back onto his pocket & that was that.
You see, no ONE was touched - let alone assaulted during the incident. Unless the bastard's phone is a 'person' under South Afrikan law, of course, and would like to lay a charge of assault. In which case, comrade phone can go ahead & lay this charge. I mean who am I to stop a whole assaulted phone from invoking its rights lol!
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!
So ke, please. No more questions and interview requests on this non-incident. There is no story here, and I'm definitely not about to further engage the white media's meek attempts to found one! If anything, we should put the white media on perpetual voicemail & not take anything it says on the student movement seriously! Rather rely on firsthand accounts of those on the ground. Otherwise bye!
Phamberi!
#DismantleWhiteArrogance
#ShutdownForFreeEducation
#IzweLethu
Earlier in the day Qwabe also commented on some of the criticism the efforts to shutdown the universities had received:
9 hrs ·
Older black people who want to silence us on the basis that they fought against apartheid need to shut the fuck up!!!
We are here because you failed us!
So please!
