The Night Malcolm X Spoke at the Oxford Union by Stephen Tuck

Author:Stephen Tuck
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520279339
Publisher: University of California Press

THE NIGHT THE SOUTH AFRICAN AMBASSADOR SPOKE IN THE OXFORD UNION

BLOOD MONEY / no more arms for South Africa.

—Placard held by Tony Abrahams at protest of South African ambassador’s visit to Oxford, June 17, 1964

Then the Oxford University Conservative Association (OUCA) overreached. They invited de Wet back to Oxford the following Wednesday, to speak in a room they had rented in the Union building. “Now that the crucial day is over and the demonstration has taken place,” explained the OUCA chairman, “I don’t think there will be any serious trouble.” Proudfoot was not so sure. “I hear, with gloom and misgiving,” she wrote to the proctors, that the students are organizing a “bigger and better ‘demo’” outside the Lamb and Flag pub (where J. R. R Tolkien and C. S. Lewis famously discussed their fantasy stories). Although she went on record—as if she needed to—saying “how v. much I dislike and distrust this ‘demo’ weapon, which the young now find such fun,” she worried that the tide had turned in favor of student protest. The proctors, she noted, had to be wary, since “a great many senior members of the University are supporters of JACARI, so that, to take any formal action against this group might well be to invite considerable trouble.”88 Proudfoot was right about the likelihood of a demonstration and wider support for JACARI. And when the proctors ignored the warning about formal action, her prediction of trouble also turned out to be spot on.

When de Wet, with a police escort, came to Oxford, a crowd of up to three hundred students gathered outside the Union in the pouring rain, shouting “Go home de Wet” and “Free Mandela” and singing protest songs to the accompaniment of a guitar.89 There was no little excitement: three fire engines were called out when students set fire to Conservative pamphlets. There were some attempted high jinks too, including a failed effort to let the air out of the ambassador’s car tires. In the end, though, the only serious incident was when a student threw a penny at the meeting room window and broke a glass pane—a gesture that the tabloid Daily Express reported as “Students burst in through the windows and dived at the Ambassador.”

In fact, the ambassador was able to speak without interruption, warning his audience that “multi-racialism” is “inevitably followed by a black dictatorship.”90 Direct contact between the ambassador and opponents of apartheid was limited to the delivery of two petitions calling for justice—one by city Labour councilors, the other by Serpell and Abrahams.91 “The Proctors took no names” of troublemakers, wrote one student reporter, “because there were no obvious ones to take.”92 Still, the London Times transformed the story into one where “nearly 100 police fought with a crowd of anti-apartheid demonstrators.”93

The ambassador headed home to London before a trip to Ascot racecourse. Two undergraduates shouted slogans at his car. The police arrested them. About sixty members of the crowd assembled outside the Union headed to the police station, where they lingered, waiting for their classmates to be released.

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