The War on the West

by Douglas Murray

As it happens, there were several codas to the Rhodes Must Fall campaign. Oriel College promised to scrap the Rhodes statue and then promised to save it. The college then agreed to have it withdrawn and also agreed not to do anything about it. This is where the situation currently stands. Since coming to fame for his Rhodes Must Fall activism, Ntokozo Qwabe returned to South Africa, where he briefly made headlines in May 2016, when he boasted in a Facebook post about something “so black” and “wonderful” that had happened that he couldn’t “stop smiling.” The wonderful thing was that in a restaurant with a friend, he had bullied a white waitress, telling her he would give her a tip “when you return the land.” When the waitress burst into tears, he laughed and dismissed her tears as “typical white tears.”48 Later, back at the University of Cape Town, Rhodes having gone, Qwabe was involved with the new “Fees Must Fall” campaign and was reported to have whipped a white student with a stick while racially abusing him. Qwabe took to Facebook to object. He admitted that he had hit the student’s phone out of his hand with a “protest stick” he always carries around with him for “cultural purposes,” but he said that he had not whipped the student. However, Qwabe added, “I wish I’d actually not been a good law-abiding citizen and whipped the white apartheid settler colonial entitlement out of the bastard.” The white student told the media that he did not want to be identified. “It’s a...