Written by: Roman Cabanac
The story of Ntokozo Qwabe has gone viral. As the leader of the RhodesMustFall campaign at Oxford, in a post-prandial act of malice, Mr. Qwabe and his companion wrote that they would give a tip when ‘the land is given back’. Mr. Qwabe, then, proceeded to post a gloating and mean-spirited post on his Facebook page, praising the act as ‘wonderful’.
On the 29th of April, Sihle Ngobese went to Obz Café and voluntarily gave a R50 tip to the waitress out of his own volition. Sihle, Jonathan Witt and I then decided to crowd fund a ‘tip’ for the waitress in question. We sent out a few tweets with some banking details and the donations started pouring in.
To give some context, Jonathan and I host a podcast called The Renegade Report on CliffCentral.com. Sihle was a popular guest on the show last week; a classical liberal filled with a ravenous streak for justice. We kept in contact with Sihle after the show as we found his passion for liberty and justice compelling. Subsequent to his tweet, Jonathan and I decided to start a fundraising campaign to assist the abused waitress. I posted a tweet with my banking details and instructions to send proof of payments to my email address.
Within the first two minutes, R150 was paid into the account. Within five hours, we received over R6 000 in donations. The tweet went viral.
What also went viral was the smug, bourgeoisie left. The snivelling sycophants of a failed ideology spread their bigotry throughout Twitter. Accusations of ‘privilege’ and ‘whiteness’ permeated the weekend. No arguments were made; only insults. We were called ‘right wing assholes who want to teach blacks a lesson’. We were called ‘ultraconservative rape apologists’. ‘Racists’ was the preferred term for most. The toxic culture of victimhood bubbled to the surface, devouring with it the positive intentions and outcomes of the campaign.
The reaction to the campaign from the left was one of utmost envy. The voluntary donations, sent by donors from all over the world proves a very pertinent point – the market will always achieve what it feels it wants to. The left beg and plead with the state to fund them; the market required a few tweets to fulfill a need. The left burn art, buildings and books; the market quietly donates to a humiliated, working-class woman. Feminists called the campaign ‘sheer violence against black pain’. But the donations steadily trickled in – hundreds of emails and tweets of support accumulated.
What we are witnessing is the implosion of leftism. All the major issues have been corrected. There is no Great War, there are no concentration camps, there is no nuclear fallout. We live in relative peace and prosperity so the big issues are gender pronouns, statues, bathrooms for trans people, fat shaming and ‘decolonization’. Your tone of voice is a ‘microaggression’, fictional books have ‘trigger warnings’, Beyoncé is the new Martin Luther King. The left don’t care what you do. They care about what you think. Criticism is now bigotry; funding for a working class woman is ‘white privilege’. There are no arguments to be made – it’s all 50 shades of bigotry.
Yet, throughout the debacle, the outcome remained. R44 777.70 was donated to a homeless waitress. A separate fund generated R60 000.00. Throughout the abuse, the silent majority gave their money to a cause they believed in. The market won and the left hated it. Let them.
Author: Roman Cabanac is a co-host on The Renegade Report, which is a “hard-hitting, factual podcast that seeks to undermine modern narratives with the use of evidence, facts and statistics.”
In this article
Zaggeta
Free markets are true democracy – and the people have spoken. The tides are turning and we are sick of tolerating hate-mongers.
Amazing initiative Roman. We have all three of you (You, Jonathan and Sihle) to thank for dispelling the barrier. The tides are turning and the left will fall in the same way they attempted to bring us all down.
Malinda Nel
Thank you, Roman and your friends!
ChristopherBlackwell
I think being a prick does not depend on your political view, color, nor economic status. You will find that many who sent the money were liberals themselves and would be considered leftist by you. Meanwhile the young man has damaged his whole movement do to his ego getting involved. That was very stupid of him, but then the young still need experience. Let us see if he is smart enough to learn anything from this. Likely not though, as it will not be recognized by him that he was acting very much like the alleged White ruling class he claims to despise .
Cannister the Lannister
We are not witnessing the implosion of leftism, we are witnessing its victory. The modern left defines itself less by a system of economics (partially because it is so materialistic, and so bourgeoise) but by its war against Western civilization. As it wins cultural battles, it is forced to open new fronts and define new enemies and becomes a race towards ever more idiocy and insanity. It thoroughly controls our culture, it controls our media, and the reason it is so outraged by charity towards someone it labels as an oppressor (skin colour trumps gender in the oppressor stakes), is because despite this it doesn’t control the hearts or minds of average people.
The problem is this, as this becomes more apparent, the left is going to become ever more willing to dispense with a ‘soft’ approach to censure and will turn to using its killer robot to destroy its adversaries. What we are witnessing in the West is the start of the Western equivalent of the Chinese cultural revolution. These people are insane, they are devoid of reason, they are hateful, smug and often very mentally ill individuals who have manouvered themselves into a position of considerable power by taking over Western culture and academia.
This snake only dies once it has destroyed everything in its vicinity and its poison begins to digest it from the inside out, until endless purges hollow it out and the society that supported it crumbles away, leaving normal human beings to rebuild a sane world from its ashes. These people are pure evil.
Jamie L
A bit of an overreaction there eh – did you type this while having your nightly whiskey to keep the joint pain away ?
Pure evil are whites who dominated the worlds economy for centuries by enslavement of people, stealing of land and colonialism. Pure evil are those people who defend these acts as the ‘bringing of civilization’
Pure evil is Hitler or Moussoulini. Pure evil is Stalin.
Pure evil is not a student writing ‘give back the land’ on a till slip in an Observatory cafe in Cape Town …
Cannister the Lannister
The root of evil is really ignorance and stupidity, genocide is the fruit. White people ended slavery, centuries before many other cultures did. They practiced it at a time when it was ubiquitous, and they were prodigious victims of it. Read up on the Barbary Pirates.
Jamie L
So you’re saying that this will end in genocide. White tears run deep. LoL
Malusi Ndwandwe
You not exactly masking your ugliness.
Jamie L
I lost brain cells reading this. A good writer you are not. (for those of you who are hard of thinking, my critique of Roman is not a defense of Mr Qwabe)
The irony here is that you accused the ‘left’ of hurling insults devoid of intellectual arguments yet you resort to the same sort of name-calling in your responses.
When you say the market will achieve what it wants to achieve you are somewhat correct in illustrating a different point – the ‘market’ as we know it in South Africa is largely white dominated, and what it wanted to achieve was white self-preservation. What you have illustrated here and indeed in the donation-for-working-class-waitress nonsense is that the white market in South Africa (which is the dominant market) is not interested in the economic liberation of blacks.
You may ask why should they be ? Well whites are the gatekeepers of wealth and opportunity in South Africa – as such their resistance to transformation has widened the inequality gap in our country (helped along of course by an inept government). Secondly as I have mentioned in the next paragraph, the white market only exists (and dominates) because of apartheid – the white market is built on ill-gotten gains and their inability to recognize this and make amends by way of substantive redistribution of wealth is what exacerbates problems of wealth, inequality, classism and racism in South Africa.
But thanks for illustrating that white privilege is still a thing … The point of criticism that you seem to miss, probably because you work as a Wills & Estates Lawyer which is the lowest common denominator in a profession that requires as much brain power as a weasel on ecstasy) is that white South Africa (aka “The Market” is uninterested in calling themselves to account and subsequently to action when the need arises to assist blacks or to redistribute the generational wealth which whites have amassed as a result of apartheid. In fact apartheid by design was optimized for white wealth creation on the backs of cheap black labor and prior to that free Malay and Indian slaves/indentured labor.
Your closing comments which seem to be pimped from Fight Club, that we live in prosperity is obviously informed by your highly subjective (read skewed) view of this country owing to your relative socio-economic privilege (read white privilege). For the child-headed homes in gang-ridden Manenberg to the dangerous streets of Gugulethu and Khayelitsha, black South Africans live a reality of struggle, survival and hardship that you could never fathom unless you jump off your high horse (or fall of a la Eugene style).
What microaggressions, colonial symbols and the like do is compound these hardships. What part of this don’t you understand. If you lived in post-war Germany would you have objected to Jewish students calling for the fall of Hitler statues or for the resignation of academics who were nazi sympathizers ?
You and your ilk seem ideologically confused – you proclaim to be liberal-orthodoxy like young Bill Mahers yet you cannot match his intellectual prowess nor his wit and further to that your ideologies seem to be more far right (at worst) and right-of-center (at best).
Cannister the Lannister
You lost a few brain cells? Then we must assume you are now running on empty.
Okay, let’s deconstruct you point by point, in the hope that there is some reason there to appeal to.
“what it wanted to achieve was white self-preservation’
Cuck/10 mate. Yes white people have a will and right towards self preservation. Not that this is actually pertinent. Most likely the donors were having fun striking back the crybully culture typified by a privileged young man gloating over his ability to exercise his own brutality and then run and hide behind the victimhood of people who share his skin colour, because non-racism or whatever.
‘Whites are gatekeepers of wealth and opportunity”
Whites are not a monolithic single class group. Many of the elites are white, but the entire political elite is black, as is the part of society where political and business elites overlap. Someone who is poor and white is not a beneficiary of this by having a white skin, except in the mind of the most rabid racist.
“Your closing comments which seem to be pimped from Fight Club, that we
live in prosperity is obviously informed by your highly subjective (read
skewed) view of this country”
He’s talking about prosperity in a historical context. People today across all class strata enjoy significantly standard of living and longevity than people in the past.
“What microaggressions, colonial symbols and the like to is compound these hardships.”
The only people who seem to mind these things are upper middle class whites who just luuurve that warm glow of paternalism they get when standing up for the oppressed, because the oppressed are clearly both equal and incapable of standing up for themselves, let alone not displaying the same levels of emotional incontinence displayed by trust fund crybullies being indoctrinated at their parents expense at voluntary re-education camps mistakenly identified as universities.
“You and your buddy seem ideologically confused – you proclaim to be
liberal-orthodoxy like young Bill Mahers yet you cannot match his
intellectual prowess nor his wit and further to that your ideologies
seem to be more far right (at worst) and right-of-center (at best).”
It gives me a warm glow that one day you will realize that your social science degree is a worthless receipt for the tens of thousands of rand you invested in becoming a Marxist parrot. Here’s some accurate information for free: his ‘liberalism’ is classical liberalism, the original leftism that was sane and principled, but got overtaken by the stampede to the left and left stranded on the ‘right’.
Jamie L
You see you and the white-privilege denialists assume as a starting point that race and socio-economic status are mutually exclusive and further to this that racism is not a problem in South Africa. So when you say that white-donors were merely fighting back against ‘cyber bully culture’ all you’re really proving once again is that white-donors only help when it benefits their own race – if they were such upstanding citizens they wouldn’t direct their donations to people of their own race whenever someone gets bullied, attacked and the like. Where were these upstanding whites when black men and women are vilified both online and in the real world?
Where are upstanding whites when a cry for economic liberation of blacks is growing yet they stubbornly hold onto the reigns of white capital fearing that opening the doors of opportunity (which they almost exclusively hold) will result in their downfall.
Nobody refutes that we live in relatively prosperous times – that argument is a red herring. The real issue is that steep socio-economic inequality between whites and blacks is an actual thing. Romans view of ‘prosperity’ as it may be is skewed as a result of ignoring this inequality. Since we are speaking about contemporary issues, prosperity in the context of this discussion is and should be spoken about with reference to our current dynamics. You see your half-arsed attempt at saving his argument is silly because arguing that we live in historically relative prosperity allows him to escape the reality of inequality based on race in South Africa and further that Black South Africans for the most part would not describe the life of an average black person as prosperous. Your argument allows Roman to conveniently ignore that the movement of student activism from left-of-center to the far left is a product of this stark inequality that exists in South Africa as Pikkety illustrated a few months ago at UCT. Yes, part of this inequality is due to an inept government but white South Africans play an equal part in this reality.
You used the “not all whites” argument – cute but miss me with that petulant outcry. While you are correct that whites are not a monolithic group, the fact remains that their poverty levels are lower, they enjoy greater opportunity, status, wealth, mortality rates and living standards in South Africa. Because wealthier whites are the gatekeepers of the economy it means that poorer whites are afforded greater opportunities to succeed should they want to.
Your next argument was just five lines of condescension – so congratulations on that.
A social science major I am not. Otherwise I wouldn’t poke fun at Romans glorified BA degree. The Berlin wall fell in ’89 mate, my disagreement with white stupidity is not analogous to supporting the policies of far-left student activists. Ntokozo acted like an idiot, but it does not excuse the idiocy of the white response.
In fact the responses from both sides were expected from real liberals – especially the digging in of feet of you morons from the far right and the morons from the far left.
But nice try. Put 5c and try again
Cannister the Lannister
The lingering question now is whether you are blind or just an imbecile. There is a significant black middle class outside of your little white ivory tower of Cape Town, they are approximately the same size as the white middle class.
As for your ludicrous claims that whites only benefit their own race, this is easily dispensed with by just looking at the people who predominantly work for, run, volunteer in and fund NGOs. I know because I actually worked in a few.
At this point your identity is becoming obvious, and the location of a deep friend slice of potato on a shoulder is becoming apparent.
Then a big blah blah pseudo intellectual bit of midwittery about nothing. Obviously the average black person is not prosperous, the majority of black people still live in relative poverty. What you are missing, quite spectacularly, is an act of kindness from a white to a white is not an act of unkindness to a black. In fact, this might be the most supremely idiotic assumption I have ever encountered, and I have encountered a few, so well done..
Everything I wrote is based on observations of reality. That you are so detached from reality that it becomes ‘far right’ in the blistered abscess located in your rather thick skull is an indication of your intelligence, or lack thereof, rather than my political orientation. But 10/10 for calling it a name. ‘Far right’. So original too. Bravo.
If you don’t have a social science degree and have managed to attain such levels of idiocy unaided then I can only express my profound admiration for your accomplishment. I imagine you sitting in front of a mirror with the sharp end of chisel up one nostril, poised with a mallet in your other hand, as you prepared to enlighten yourself.
I can humiliate you further if you like (although not without your assistance). Not that you have the intellectual capacity to recognize when you’ve not only brought a banana to a gunfight, but shot yourself in the foot with it too.
Jamie L
“There is a significant black middle class outside… they are approximately the same size as the white middle class”
With just one sentence you proved to yourself and the world that you possess about as much socioeconomic knowledge of South Africa as Steve Hofmeyr. Not only is it factually incorrect (plz do research mevrou) but its a stupid thing to say. Even if it were correct (which it is not) whites are the major stakeholders in the private sector where all our wealth is tied up.
Of course the point you’re missing (and conflating with your unrelated subjective ‘experiences’ in the NGO sector) is that the general expectation in South Africa is that whites here are more inclined to be charitable towards a ‘white cause’ when they ‘feel attacked’ than to work on more real problems like poverty eradication. In your previous reply you even admitted to this by saying that ‘whites have a right to self-preservation’ .
So you have fallen into your own trap of contradictions by saying on one hand that whites are not predisposed to helping whites at the expense of helping blacks but on the other hand yous say whites have a right to self-preservation. Of course like everything in life there are exceptions. White privilege does not argue that whites are NEVER charitable to blacks, its that they rarely are (or only when it suits their purposes)
When ones petulant argument runs out of steam one must resort to name-calling as you have done. Better get back to the drawing board young one …
Cannister the Lannister
You definitely live in Cape Town. Bud, in Joburg I am surrounded by the black middle class. I went to school with the black middle class. A large chunk of this is in the public sector and very generously paid. This stuff isn’t exactly a secret. There are multiple sources available on the black middle class, where class is defined by set criteria irrespective of race: the UCT Unilever Institute did one such study pinning the number at 4.2 million.
So you’re wrong categorically. So not just stupid, ill informed. Not just blind, but ignorant.
Now your blather about whites not working on poverty eradication. Having previously presumed you had reached the threshold of your idiocy, you have gleefully punctured it.
You do realize that most whites are paying upward of 50% of their income to the government via various taxes, which is in turn tasked with poverty alleviation? If these people quit their jobs to work on philanthropic concerns full time, there would be no tax income. Say goodbye public sector jobs. Not to mention these people actually do things in the economy that create jobs, which are far more useful than handouts.
Then your rubbish about white causes – again mistakenly identifying the events of last week as an act of charity rather than people from several races making a statement against you crybullies. Boo effing hoo.
“White privilege does not argue that whites are NEVER charitable to
blacks, its that they rarely are (or only when it suits their purposes)”
Boy are you a small minded little bigot, apart from having not much life experience. It’s almost.. it’s almost as if you’re the kind of person who would walk into a restaurant, ask a working class waitress to give back your land because you’re too much of a twat to give a tip, and then go gloat about it on Facebook. Also a very poor sock-puppeteer, ‘Jamie’ ‘L’.
And I’m not calling you random names pal. I am describing the profoundly disturbing reality of who you are. Small, in every sense. Apart from which people on the radical left don’t understand reason, they only understand rhetoric. Once cannot appeal to the unreasonable with reason, as you’ll no doubt demonstrate in very short order.
Roman Cabanac
Why are you assuming only whites were donors? Do you assume blacks are uncharitable?
Jamie L
Nice digression by straw manning me bud.
*But to indulge you one last time, the (correct) assumption is that whites were the (overwhelming) majority of donors.
You’re also proving a different point : That the majority of donors were white is not because blacks are uncharitable, but because they don’t possess the economic prowess of whites to enable such donations. Even if they did possess such economic prowess, they would donate to eradicating black poverty and not succumbing to white tears. But they cannot donate, because whites are economic gatekeepers and an economic powerhouse in South Africa – because of generational wealth and the culture of self-preservation that locks-out blacks from the market economy in South Africa. This is despite whites making up just shy of 10% of the country.
What about self-liberation you may ask? Great question Roman, institutional and structural racism runs so deep in South Africa because of white (socio-economic) privilege that it thwarts any attempts at black success (save for the few exceptional cases which you no doubt were raring to mention upon reading this)
Stick to doing what the dumbest of the dumb in a profession that attracts morons do best and draw up a Will for your sickly argument 😉
Roman Cabanac
Didn’t answer my question and then insult me? I will listen to your argument, if you had one.
Jamie L
Perhaps take time to read more carefully then kiddo. I did answer your question by saying whites were not the only donors but they were the majority of donors. Similarly I disproved your attempt at reading in an assumption that blacks are uncharitable into my argument. Will I need to summarize everything for you boet?
And do you not understand what a straw man is. Sheesh man will I have to teach you argumentation 101 – if you were the intellectual powerhouse you claim to be you’d be strolling through the halls of the Bar with the Gauntletts, Budlenders and Trengoves of the legal world, not drawing up wills and hosting a radio show which resembles a confusing hybrid between Fox News an AWB meeting and Jacques Roussouw when he’s had one drink too many. So save the sarcasm for a day when you’re actually able to think further than your nose.
Jamie L
And so Roman was silenced. Ironically a quick search indicates that you have accused people of straw manning in the past…
Malusi Ndwandwe
I’m sure you’d like to know that the fund was started by a Nguni Man, but you aint interested in fact. You here to jerk off on how much of a do-gooder you is.
Larsen Bjorn
And… With immaculate timing, an actual, almost too caricaturist, example appears of the very thinking so well captured in the main article. Take away the leftist vocabulary and you’re left with… Smugness. Although the verbosity detracts somewhat from the entertainment value.
Jamie L
Oh Larsen. If only you could see the irony of your name-calling as a substitute for an actual counter-argument.
Malusi Ndwandwe
LOL No trigger warnings around here you do-gooding snowflake
Jamie L
When black people accused a white business of racism white people be like “HEY DON’T PULL THE RACE CARD’
When a white waitress gets upset because a black guy wrote ‘give back the land’ on the back of a till-slip whites be like “OMG BOET RACISM RACISM RACISM LETS HELP THE POOR WAITRESS WHO WENT TO ART SCHOOL AND CAN AFFORD TATTOOS”
izzola dizzo
I would just want to know one thing Roman, is this the first time you have come across an abused waiter/waitress, black,white or any other color in this land of contradictions? You seem to have found the perfect antidote to racism!!
Jamie L
Jacques Rousseau described this issue perfectly
” Both of those goals could, in my view, have been achieved without creating the impression of a couple of (literally) white knights charging in to protect one of their own against the (literally) dark forces of RMF. And, creating that impression simply lends credence to one of the legitimate concerns of the RMF movement, namely that white South Africans (and people, in general) are far too unaware and unconcerned about the fate of black people compared to the fate of other whites.
It’s of course true that it should, in theory, be possible to separate these issues from race, and to simply regard this as an act of generosity. But to think that people will (or even should) do so now in the political landscape that is South Africa is either naive or wilfull denialism. To refuse to countenance any criticism on this topic – as the Renegade Report hosts have done in their Twitter responses – is difficult to read as anything other than a commitment to making a point, rather than being humanitarians, even if the outcome of their commitment is a plus for humanitarianism, on balance.”
Malusi Ndwandwe
Oh look you one of them do-gooding race hustlers who have it all figured out aint you?
Unfit2govern
thanks Guys, Well done and what a perfect unfolding of events as they happen. It is nice to see the defenders of the self entitled blustering away clutching at every new speak straw on the way down
P D KEOUGH
I AM SO SICK OF HEARING OF “BLACK PAIN”. THEY DO NOTHING BUT MOAN AND GROAN ABOUT HOW BADLEY THEY HAVE BEEN TREATED. NOW ALL THEY CAN DO WELL IS BURN, PILLAGE AND DESTROY. THEY DESERVE ALL THE PAIN THEY GET!!!!!
Cliff Smith
I see your article provoked a rather bizarre fairytale by #gillianschutte over at the Thought Leader website which quotes “The Market Evisceration of RhodesMustFall” extensively.
Nice to see that here at the Rational Standard there is apparently no censorship in the comments providing a lively debate where all comers are welcome to come and throw their penny in the plate.
However – my comments on the Thought Leader article keep getting deleted because – I guess -they apparently do not echo Ms Schutte’s world view. Here for your edification is the deleted comment so you can try and identify what bitter keyboard crime warranted it’s deletion. Please note that while I part censor my expletives with a star Ms Schutte freely throws around the likes of “dickheadedness” and “white people fuckery” in her monologue with no apparent consequences.
Wogan
You know, I have an honest question here. One of the core pillars of the “black oppression” narrative is that the “white people must give the land back that was stolen” in 1914 or 1652 or whatever. When the government peacefully transitioned from the NP to the ANC in 1994, wasn’t that white people giving the land, the country, and the whole damn machine “back”?
Every policy failure in land reform in the last 22 years (meaning more time than most of these so-called ‘activists’ have been alive) has happened under the watch of a majority-black ANC government. It’s not entirely their fault, I’d think – the smartest ones would have realized that land only has value when used in production, and to rip away the means of production would crash the entire system.
I just think it’s worth pointing out that every square meter of land in South Africa has been presided over by a majority black presidency, cabinet and parliament, and that the “greatest liberation movement in Africa” has had a constitutional majority for all but the last few years. At any point they could have bucked the trend Mugabe style – chased out the colonists, blamed it on imperialism and carved up the country, distributing land to every person in it.
I mean, as far as I’m concerned, this battle was won in 1994. Actual activists took an actual stand against an actually-oppressive regime, some of them gave their actual lives for their beliefs, and thanks to them we’re living in the society we have today. The failures since then have been multiple, but I don’t think any of them are going to be solved with land reform – rather with education, skills development, and equal access to opportunity.
I think the REAL issue here is that these twactivists are spending too much time on social media. In the US, blacks (an actual ethnic minority that endured actual slavery) are fighting against a brutal, systemic oppression at the hands of police, debt collectors and for-profit colleges, and they’ve got a long way to go, but that is not the same fight as in South Africa. Their timelines are filled with retweets and shares from the USA, and it’s started clouding how they see things here, chasing bogeymen where none exist.