Rather His Own Man

by Geoffrey Robertson

  Back at Oxford, there was still no interest in human rights, in the Law Faculty or anywhere else. In Londonderry ‘civil liberties’ had started to matter as the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland began to chafe under Protestant repression, but the major reforms of the Wilson government in legalising abortion and homosexuality and abolishing theatre censorship had lulled people in England into thinking that they lived in the best of all liberal worlds. A small book by Harry Street, first published in 1963, which I was later to rewrite, Freedom, the Individual and the Law, said otherwise, identifying the failures, for example, to hold over-powerful policemen to account, but there was a popular television cop – ‘Dixon of Dock Green’ – who was so utterly benign that his public charisma covered up the deep and dark corruption at Scotland Yard.

  Internationally, of course, concern about Vietnam abounded, and there was hostility to racism in Ian Smith’s breakaway Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa. But human rights were being abused throughout the world, and the one organisation trying to do something about it was Amnesty International. I joined its group in Oxford, only to discover that all its members could do was to write polite – indeed grovelling – letters to dictators, begging them to desist from torture and mass murder and to set free those whom Amnesty considered ‘political prisoners’. From this class it excepted those prisoners, like Nelson Mandela, who refused to renounce violence. There were endless terminological disputes: I felt we should support prisoners who advocated violence only as a means of overthrowing a violent dictatorship rather than the sort of violence which would take civilian lives, but the distinction was still not clear. At least we could concentrate on dictators who killed dissidents irrespective of their views about overthrowing the state. So I took up my pen – so pathetically less mighty than the sword – and began to write.

  To his Excellency Idi Amin Dada, V.C. and Bar,

  Amnesty (Oxford) respectfully requests that you might graciously be pleased to hold an inquest into the deaths of the three judges of your Court of Appeal, whose bodies (headless) were found floating in the river outside Kampala after they had delivered a judgment to which, perhaps on reasonable grounds, you took exception …

  Later I would write:

  Dear General Pinochet,

  Amnesty is very concerned at reports of torture chambers in Santiago …

  This would have pleased the general, had he read it, because he wanted to encourage reports about his torture chambers in order to deter those who might otherwise have to be placed in them. But of course those letters were never opened, as I discovered years later when bored bureaucrats in apartheid South Africa showed me their drawers of unopened letters from Amnesty members, including one of my own. It proved my instinct that the human rights movement would never get very far by begging tyrants to be less tyrannical. But just twenty-five years after I had written the letter to General Pinochet, he was placed under arrest in London for torture and I acted for Human Rights Watch in the case against him. In the 1970s this turn of events would have seemed fantastical: talk of actually holding heads of state accountable for their crimes was the most far-fetched of pipe dreams.

  A colossus struck by time’s arrow in 1970 was Cecil Rhodes. The problem that arose when I arrived at Oxford, and which should have been appreciated long before, was that the nine scholarships allocated annually to South Africa had been subject to the most outrageous race discrimination: of all the hundreds of scholars sent to Oxford since the scheme had begun in 1903 not a single one of them had been a black or ‘Cape Coloured’ student. Not a single member of any selection committee for South African Rhodes scholars had been non-white. This was truly a scandal, and previous generations of scholars had turned a blind eye. Our 1970 intake refused to stomach it – the American scholars issued a fact sheet setting out the statistics and pointing out that four of the nine scholarships were tied to schools that did not accept black students, while the racist outlook of South African selectors kept the other five scholarships confined to whites.

  Julian Disney and I tramped through the rain to furious meetings in smoky Balliol common rooms, and eighty-five of us – the majority of Rhodes scholars in residence – signed a petition threatening to give back our scholarships unless the trustees took immediate action to ensure the appointment of non-white scholars. Bill Williams, the rather slippery Warden of Rhodes House, pretended to be sympathetic, although in private he snidely remarked that ‘the present generation of students have found South Africa the cushiest “demo” available’.2 There was nothing cushy about this demo – we were appalled that complacent men like Williams, the Rhodes trustees and the selectors in South Africa had let our scholarships fall into such disrepute and we were sincerely prepared to give them up. (I even wondered whether it would be too late for that Menzies scholarship to Harvard.) I remember agonising, with Julian and others, over the decision – we did not want to make a futile gesture like John Lennon, who had returned his MBE in protest against the war in Vietnam. But even if only a few of us sacrificed our scholarships it would be big news and a public blow to the Trust. The trustees knew this, so they made a public statement promising reform. On behalf of Australian Rhodes scholars, Julian and I issued a statement welcoming changes to the ‘obviously intolerable’ racist aspects of the system, but warning future scholars of their duty to maintain momentum for reform – we did not trust our slothful trustees to spend the time and money necessary to ensure the selection of a representative quota of non-white students.

  It is fair to say that change did not come easily. Although the trustees did make some efforts, after the 1970 revolt, when we returned for the eightieth anniversary of the Rhodes Trust in 1983, we discovered that only two black scholars had by then been selected – our successors had not maintained the rage. The statistics from South Africa are much better today, as you would expect, but the comments Julian and I made about the prospect of an Aboriginal Rhodes scholar (we had Charlie Perkins, who would have been perfectly qualified, in mind) went unheeded for forty years: Rebecca Richards was the first, chosen from South Australia in 2010.

  Certainly, we expended a lot of emotional energy in protesting against the exclusion of black men, but without giving much thought to the fact that black and white women were ineligible for selection. Rhodes himself probably gave no thought to it either. The sexist clause in his will was abrogated by the UK’s 1975 Equal Opportunities Act and needed no Rhodes scholar revolt to speed its passage. I am proud, nonetheless, of my part in that revolt and I surprised myself by my willingness, as a matter of conscience, to walk away from Oxford, if necessary, after only a year, without taking a degree. In due course I obtained one – a postgraduate Bachelor of Civil Laws – although it may be a measure of Oxford’s irrelevance to my future that I have never bothered, to this day, to ‘take’ it by turning up with gown and mortarboard and rusty Latin to a degree ceremony.

  As for Cecil Rhodes, the evil that he did lived after him: his statue has recently been taken down at Cape Town University, and in 2016 the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ campaign demanded the removal of his effigy, which stands in the wall of his old college, Oriel, his head sheltered by gauze to stop pigeons getting a toehold for their toilet. The campaign was widely ridiculed – the first publicity-seeking ‘scholar’ (I use the term loosely) to condemn it was Tony Abbott, who thought it had something to do with rewriting history. It did not: it had much to do with a university where very few black students are selected to study, where few dons are black, where black history is not taught, where the prime object of the education on offer is to produce a white professional elite and where black students are routinely stopped and refused entry to their colleges until they produce identification.3 The 2016 campaign was led by black Rhodes scholars from South Africa – the very people we sought to bring into existence by our revolt in 1970.

  The ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ question reflects debates throughout the world about how to preserve the memory of those whose historical claims to gre
atness require revision. In 2017 the US was in uproar over Donald Trump’s apparent sympathy for neo-Nazi protests against tearing down a statue of the Confederate General Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville – erected a century ago by racists as part of the push for ‘Jim Crow’ laws, a fact that now justifies having such statues torn down or moved to a museum, where the racism behind the statue (although Lee himself was against slavery) can be fully explained. People are entitled to change their view of historical heroes: in 2015 citizens in the Ukraine cut to pieces a Soviet-era statue of Marx’s collaborator Frederick Engels to protest against Russian aggression; the following year it was retrieved and reassembled in the city of Manchester to celebrate his contribution to the socialism newly popularised by Jeremy Corbyn. Both actions were fair enough.

  In Australia, author and journalist Stan Grant has objected to the way we venerate some British historical heroes.4 I do not mind Captain Cook, an explorer rather than a coloniser, or Arthur Phillip, who drafted the country’s first law, which was against slavery. But over in Adelaide, the statues of Colonel Light and Governor Hindmarsh celebrate profiteers who stole Aboriginal land, contrary to the express provision in their royal charter. If their statues are to remain, this fault should be added to their plinths, in the interest of historical awareness.5 When Julia Zemiro ‘home delivered’ me back to my old school recently, I was taken aback to find that the newly built ‘function centre’ (an unhappy phrase) has been named after Edmund Barton. ‘Toby Tosspot’ had nothing to do with Epping or with education – he was a drunkard who persistently degraded Aboriginal people. When students at Epping Boys High School become more aware of Australian history, I hope they will agitate for a name change, perhaps to honour some woman in our nation’s story – Faith Bandler or Jessie Street or Clare Stevenson or Henry Handel Richardson – whose place in our past holds some inspiration for our future.

  As for the Rhodes statue (I must have walked the cobbled street hundreds of times without noticing its niche in the wall), there is nothing celebratory about the impression it gives. It is there because Rhodes was there, and he gave the college a lot of money – a charitable action to which no objection could be taken. The ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ campaigners would do better to climb the north face of Rhodes House to hack off the Zimbabwe bird that nests on top, and return it to the mysterious site in former Rhodesia from which it was plundered. That would make a point about colonialism robbing civilisations of their legacy, and about the return of cultural property, as well as about Rhodes’ imperialist and racist mentality. I would leave the statue of Cecil in his niche, but remove the gauze that protects his head from the bird-droppings of history. I can claim in support of that position no better race warrior than Robert Mugabe. When faced with demands that Rhodes himself should be dug up from the scenic grave that I visited in the Matopo Hills, he ordered instead that the grave should be protected and kept as a tourist attraction. ‘The bones do no harm, but we want to make them pay taxes.’6

  My own ideal Rhodes scholar is my friend Julian Disney, who returned to Australia to eschew the lucrative legal career that beckoned in favour of badly paid public service as head of the Australian Council of Social Services (ACOSS), raising a powerful and reasoned voice on behalf of the poor. Also among our number is Howard Florey from Adelaide University, who for developing penicillin as a therapeutic anti-bacterial agent was awarded a Nobel Prize – an accolade not hitherto regarded as objectionable, although it comes from the profits on guns and gunpowder. There are – all too infrequently – Rhodes scholars whose talents are in the creative arts, or who are even eccentrics. May they increase. Australians seem to think, thanks to Hawke and Abbott and Turnbull, that a Rhodes scholarship is designed to talent-spot future prime ministers. In fact, the opposite is the case: Rhodes did not want to train political leaders, whose crucial qualities he insightfully described as ‘brutality, smugness and unctuous rectitude’.

  By the time of the Rhodes Trust’s remarkable eightieth anniversary in 1983, the trustees calculated that they had more money than the university itself. So they spent it, not (as they should have) on endowing more scholarships, but on a lavish celebration in which we were invited back to our Oxford colleges for a weekend of festivities, to be capped by an audience with the Queen. For this purpose the ancient wall between Wadham College and Rhodes House was dismantled for a day, at vast expense, to accommodate the conga-line of ex-scholars who would pay respects to Her Majesty, as if they were medieval knights subject to her command, and afterwards the wall was reassembled and re-cemented. It was an outrageous waste of money, and the more republican scholars decided to disdain the opportunity to bow and chat with the monarch. We had to book for the event a year in advance, and I was asked whether my wife would accompany me. I said ‘yes’ (well, you never know what might happen in a year) and took an Irish actress, Jeananne Crowley, of pronounced republican sympathies, who joined me with the other refuseniks – Ronnie and Betsy Dworkin and a dozen or so self-styled republicans – on a mound that overlooked the royal queue. But the majesty of Her Majesty worked its spell, and as the Queen neared the end of the line, they started to defect, eventually leaving only the Dworkins and the make-believe Robertsons in lonely but principled splendour.

  Otherwise, it was an enjoyable event: Harold Macmillan had been lured out of retirement to make the best after-dinner speech I have ever heard – a reminder of just how super ‘Supermac’ must have been in his heyday. Back at college there was a reunion with Bill Clinton, then governor of Arkansas, who was trying out his handshake: he would stretch out his hand as if it were a tentacle from his heart, and hold yours long enough to drain away any resistance to whatever he was selling – invariably, himself. After he stepped down from the White House, we met once more at another reunion at Univ. Bob Hawke was invited for good measure – the measure being the yard of ale he had once drunk in college to enter the Guinness Book of Records. He was able to repeat the feat, because that night the ale was even more watered down than is usual for English beer.

  The Rhodes Scholarship, at the time I held one, was most accommodating: it provided a reasonable stipend and there was no immediate need to settle on any particular course of study. I had a year to make up my mind, which could be spent getting to know Oxford, or England, or indeed the continent. I decided that the best thing about Britain was its proximity to France, and was soon venturing to behold Paris, a city of historic splendour, even if the fruit of collaboration with the Nazis, who did not in consequence subject it to a Blitz. At Shakespeare and Company, a famous bookshop, I was offered a bed for as many nights as I liked, although it had fallen on hard times and the rat droppings under the proffered palliasse disinclined me to spend any night in this literary shrine. Further afield lay the Côte d’Azur, and the less touristed beaches of Languedoc, where I found a small fishing village – Bouzigues – with oysters that rivalled in taste my favourite Sydney Rocks.

  University holidays were long, which left plenty of time to explore Europe. Winter meant skiing in Austria (only once: I never got past snow-ploughing) and in summer the inevitable charter flight to the glory that was a Greek island. At Easter, Disney and I explored Spain at a rapid speed, observing the economic cost of fascism – the peseta had hit rock bottom in the last stultifying years of Franco’s reign, and we stayed in great style for peanuts at paradores, castles from the days of Don Quixote de la Mancha. Some years ago I wrote disparagingly of American Rhodes scholars that they ‘regarded the university as little more than a five-star refuge from the draft: a place for post-coital punting and a base for touring Europe’. I can’t imagine now why I was disparaging – everyone can benefit from a gap year or two, and Oxford has stood for many centuries without requiring input from anyone until after they leave, when it is avidly sought in the form of donations. I did the right – or at least the expected – thing by my college for many years, in the form of an annual tax-deductible charitable bequest, but then, on principle, I stopped. Oxford is a ph
enomenally wealthy citadel of privilege, which even in the twenty-first century helps mainly the children of the upper and middle classes to take those privileges into adulthood. I became a trustee of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), part of London University, and have redirected to it what time or money I have to spare. On its students, not Oxford’s, the world’s fight will depend.

  My own efforts to fight the world’s fight had not proceeded far during my first term: my letter to Idi Amin had not been answered and the only fight that looked like being a success was against the Rhodes Trust itself. The Conservative government had started to make life difficult for Australians in order to make it impossible for black students from former colonies: those of us from the Commonwealth who could not boast a British grandparent were deemed ‘non-patrials’ and would be out on our ears once our course had finished, so my hopes of appearing at the Old Bailey would be dashed. I had an English girlfriend – Jane Turnbull, a history undergraduette from St Hilda’s – and wondered whether marriage might be a way out, or at least a way to stay in. Academically, I was still toying with the idea of doing a doctorate on blue-sky tax havens, but then along came a small bear with a large penis to decide my career trajectory. It was Rupert Bear, in ‘School Kids’ Oz, whose head had been placed on a body in a state of high erection, drawn by underground cartoonist Robert Crumb. This had shocked the nation, and Oz editor Richard Neville, who had transplanted the masthead from Sydney to London, had been charged, along with fellow editors Felix Dennis and Jim Anderson, with ‘conspiracy to corrupt public morals’.7

  One evening Richard came to Oxford to talk about his impending prosecution, and having raised money for his first trial in Sydney seven years before, I offered to defend him and his fellow editors in this new ordeal, promising to make the Oz trial an obscenity trial to end all obscenity trials. The defence team had a vacancy – in fact, a yawning gap, with hundreds of supporters and hangers-on and no full-time lawyer to prepare the defence. I took the role, armed with my free-speech philosophy, and threw myself into constructing arguments that depictions of sexual conduct neither depraved, corrupted nor debauched the morals of young persons within the realm, and even if they did, the magazine had enough literary and artistic merit to justify its publication. This last defence would be difficult, but I persuaded Marty Feldman, David Hockney and Feliks Topolski to testify, and visited London’s leading psychologists and psychiatrists – Hans Eysenck, Edward de Bono and others – who were prepared to say that reading mischievous rudery does no real harm.