“WE WILL GIVE TIP WHEN YOU RETURN THE LAND”
Cape Town – A controversial “Rhodes Must Fall” activist sparked an intense race row on social media this week after he posted about how he and other patrons at an Observatory restaurant confronted a white waitress.
Ntokozo Qwabe, who late last year made news for driving a campaign to remove a Cecil John Rhodes statue at Oxford University in the UK, said his friends returned a bill to the waitress saying: “WE WILL GIVE TIP WHEN YOU RETURN THE LAND.”
She cried.
Wow. Brilliant. Withhold pay from someone serving food in a restaurant – that will teach the colonialists! Those people who serve food in restaurants have had all the power and money for far too long, and it’s about time someone took the struggle to them.
Another source has the Facebook post in which Qwabe boasted about this feat of punching down up.
LOL wow unable to stop smiling because something so black, wonderful & LIT just happened! And of course, the catalyst was a radical non-binary trans black activist – Wandile Dlamini – from the Rhodes Must Fall movement. Because trans activists have BEEN the ultimate blessers of this decolonial struggle!
To cut the long story short, we are out at Obz Cafe with the said activist, and the time for the bill comes. Our waitress is a white woman. I ask the said activist what the going rate for tips/gratuity is in these shores. They look at me very reluctantly and they say ‘give me the slip, I’ll sort that out’. I give them the slip.
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!). Anyways, so this white woman goes to her colleagues who are furious. She exits to cry at the back & a white male colleague of hers reluctantly comes out to address us & to annoy us more with his own white tears telling us that he finds our act “racist”.
So, what a shitty human being, eh? He makes a servant cry by refusing to pay her for her work and then gloats and giggles about it on Facebook.
Also, what on earth does trans activism have to do with Rhodes Must Go? Or struggles against colonialism in general? And what’s a “non-binary trans” activist? The two contradict each other. Trans=two sexes and a trans person is the other one. Non-binary=more than two sexes. Trans is binary.
The rest of his post:
We then start breaking it down for this white man & ask him why they are catching feelings when we haven’t even started (like the part where we take up arms hasn’t even come & yall are already out here drowning us in your white tears? Really white people? Wow.). We start drawing him to the political nature of the act & why we couldn’t be bothered that they decided to catch feelings from the note. We tell him it’s great that business as usual has stopped & the pressing issue of land is now on the agenda in that space – seeing the cowntry was celebrating ‘Freedom Day’ yesterday. We then chase him back to do his job. And continue with our conversation before exiting the café.
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 bullshit. 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. That will be the starting point of all our interactions from now. We will agitate all our spaces with the big question: WHERE IS THE LAND?
Thank you to all the non binary, trans & all other black bodies who have been at the helm of this decolonial moment in the settler colony known as South Afrika. NOTHING will ever be the same again. Alibuye Izwe Lethu!
The politics of bullies. Bullying is not progressive. Talk about trans bodies and this decolonial moment all you want to, but it won’t make bullying progressive.
Fittingly, the “Rhodes Must Fall” activist who wrote the FB post attends Oxford as a Rhodes scholar.
@ #1The Great God Pan
Yes he does. And here’s his page on the Rhodes Scholarship website:
http://www.rhodeshouse.ox.ac.uk/rhodes-scholars-elect-class-of-2014/ntokozo-qwabe
Oh yeah? How do you know?
Woah, non-binary AND trans! A multiple gold medallist at the Oppression Olympics! I suppose that explains why they feel so smug when all they did was make an uninvolved person feel like shit – when you are engaged in competitive oppression, all punching is ‘punching up.’
(As an aside, I have come to loathe the ‘punching up / down’ construction. As is becoming increasingly common, a potentially reasonale point has been condensed down to a single glib sentence and is now thrown around as liberally as rice at a fucking wedding.)
Wanker.
Groups given thanks:
non-binary
trans
all other.
But I thought failing to mention a group that is a subset of a larger group, and only mentioning that larger group, was erasure? Where are the thaks for the binaries!!
“We are tired of ‘not all white people'”
What happened to intersectionalism? Why doesn’t he have to consider class and gender when he talks about race? So he can be free to intimidate and humiliate working class women?
Sickening behaviour.
Intersectional only matters when it comes to guilt-tripping women into doing the labor for other groups.
Which is exactly what is happening here: oh, this is a white woman, let’s make her feel bad and say that, even though she has no land and know authority, because she is white, she owes us a bunch of political labor to demand our land back for us. And until then, she doesn’t deserve the money she worked for at her actual job.
This reminds me of the Roxane Gay Happy Meal drama. Supposedly “woke” academics taking out their frustrations on the working class.
I’d be slightly more likely to be convinced of their moral virtue if it weren’t so obviously self-serving. Must be nice to be (1) off the hook for paying for services and (2) riding your moral hobby horse, too.
Does this individual often fantasize about being a blonde White women? Perhaps the White waitress embodied everything envied.
An encouraging update.
http://www.timeslive.co.za/local/2016/04/30/Now-THATS-a-tip-Twitter-raises-R13%E2%80%9A000-for-RMF-waitress
John @8:
That’s awesome.
I know this isn’t the point of the piece, but what does “non-binary” even mean? Is it different from “gender non-conforming,” which we all are in one way, or to one degree, or another?
I don’t know. Different people give different explanations. The words are…how shall I say…descriptive rather than technical, so precision isn’t really required, or even valued.
From John’s link (at #10)
Oops, Ophelia wrote about this earlier. I really should catch up before I comment.
Not necessarily! Often it’s good to repeat highlights just for emphasis.
I don’t even know what to make of this. Is this person under the impression that “white people” collectively own “the land” and have meetings about it? (“Yes, the land is still under the control of us white people, see you next month!”) Is there a particular white person that must be mobilized?