How speaking up for human rights can get you evicted from the 'Home of Free Speech'
The Oxford Union's bicentenary is a timely opportunity to recall events when Botswana's President visited
The Oxford Union Society, almost certainly the most well-known debating society in the world, celebrates its bicentenary this year. 200 years after its foundation, the Union has become famous not only as a kind of “nursery” or “training ground” for an astonishing number of people who have gone onto play major roles in British public life - Prime Ministers, Cabinet Ministers, politicians, political party leaders, archbishops, bishops, judges, Lord Chancellors, diplomats, literary and cultural figures etc - but also because of the extraordinary roster of people who have given talks or participated in debates there. These include Jimmy Carter, Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Bobby Kennedy, the Dalai Lama, David Lloyd George, Jawaharlal Nehru, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Mother Teresa and Malcolm X, to name just a few.
Given the bicentenary, I thought 2023 an appropriate year to publish an article about how more than 20 people - myself among them - were ejected from the Union’s premises some years ago after protesting the Botswana government’s appalling treatment of several 1000 indigenous Gana and Gwi “Bushmen” from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR). That protest - respectful and non-disruptive - was organised by the UK-headquartered human rights organisation Survival International, for whom I was working at the time. What happened that evening in Oxford makes an obvious mockery of the Union’s claim to believe “first and foremost in freedom of speech: nothing more, nothing less”, and the “Home of Free Speech” tag that sometimes it is accorded.
The article, titled “I thought this place was all about free speech”: The Oxford Union, diamonds and the struggle for indigenous rights, has been published on my website. It is a detailed reconstruction of events at the Union that evening, based on hours of interviews with as many eye-witnesses as possible.
“Someone definitely grabbed my upper arm,” one young woman ejected from the Union’s Debating Chamber told me. “I remember it because it was a shocking thing to feel - it was from behind me and I was sat maybe one or two spaces in from the aisle, but it was heavy and quite a hard grasp and the man - it was a whisper, a pretty vicious threatening whisper - said either “If you carry this on, you’ll be out” or “We’re going to have to ask you to leave now.” I can’t quite remember which of those it was, but it was something like that. And it wasn’t intended to be audible. It was shocking.”
“He was incredibly intimidating - he was very big, and he got very, very close to me,” said another young woman, outside in the Union’s courtyard just before she was instructed to leave. “I can’t remember what else he said, but he was like “Get out, get out!””
“One of the heavies approached me and began to manhandle me off the premises,” Survival’s director, Stephen Corry, told me. “He grabbed my arm. I didn’t attempt to lie down and resist or anything like that, but I didn’t make it particularly easy for him either. I was pretty much shoved and dragged out to the street.”
If the Union really believed in “free speech”, why were so many of us forced off the premises for wearing t-shirts, handing out leaflets and, in one case, ostensibly just waiting to use the Ladies’ loo? We were all, it is worth emphasising, either Union members’s guests or Union members.
And who exactly were those “incredibly intimidating” security men who threw us out, and under whose authority had they been operating?
In 1923, at a dinner to mark the Union’s centenary, Union historian H A Morrah asked: “What has been the object of this Society, all along, but free discussion?” If Morrah truly felt that, he must have been turning in his grave the evening Botswana’s President, Festus Mogae, came to talk.