New Oxford Rhodes scholar: I don’t support Rhodes (or need the scholarship)

Steerpike readers will be familiar with the antics of Ntokozo Qwabe — the Rhodes scholar, who boasted about making a waitress shed ‘white tears’ after he asked her to ‘return the land’. While the Oxford’s Rhodes Must Fall co-founder has since completed his law studies in Britain and returned to South Africa — where he has been interrupting lectures with a large stick — a new Rhodes scholar is on the way.

Like Qwabe, Joshua Nott has decided to accept a £40,000 scholarship from the Rhodes Trust despite being actively involved in the Rhodes Must Fall movement, which campaigned to have a statue of Cecil Rhodes — the British mining magnate — removed from Cape Town University on the grounds that it symbolised racism and colonialism.

Defending his decision to accept the scholarship, Nott — who compared the statue to ‘a swastika in Jerusalem’ — said he was no a hypocrite as he would use the ‘Rhodes scholarship to defeat the very ideals of what it originally stood for’.