STANDING UP AGAINST RACISM AND BIGOTRY Now THAT’S a tip: Twitter raises R13‚000 for RMF waitress:

Donations received from as far afield as England‚ Canada and Germany swelled a fund for the waitress to R13‚381 by 11am on Saturday‚ according to Roman Cabanac of Johannesburg‚ one of the three men behind the Twitter campaign.

The first gift – R50 – came from Sihle Ngobese‚ the spokesman for Western Cape social development MEC Albert Fritz‚ who went to the ObzCafe after work on Friday to find the waitress.

She had been reduced to tears by Ntokozo Qwabe‚ an RMF leader at Oxford University‚ who then posted a Facebook rant about what he and fellow activist Wandile Dlamini had done.

He wrote: “We are out at ObzCafe … and the time for the bill comes. Our waitress is a white woman. I ask … 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!).”

Ngobese told TimesLive on Saturday that he found Qwabe’s post “insulting‚ racist and disgraceful” and felt the least he could do was to give the waitress the tip she had been denied. He posted a photograph on Twitter of his receipt for R50‚ with the handwritten words “And the kindness is free. F*** RMF!”

“Qwabe misses the complete irony of what he did‚” Ngobese told TimesLive. “If you want to talk about privilege‚ being a master’s graduate from Oxford and lording it over a minimum-wage waitress is the height of irony. It speaks to the disdain I have for RMF’s claims to being a voice for the downtrodden.”

Well, that’s Social-Justice-Warriorism in a nutshell, isn’t it?