Saïd  Business School 

The Elephant in the Ivory Towers

‘I would like to pay tribute to the Rhodes Must Fall campaign who have seen their aims come a big step closer today, and also to the Black Lives Matter campaigners who have reinvigorated this debate about our history and how it should be recognised’.

Councillor Susan Brown Leader of Oxford City Council.

In light of Oriel College’s decision to remove a controversial statue of colonialist diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes, it would appear that Oxford’s Rhodes Must Fall/Black Lives Matter campaigners are now accepted as arbitrators of who or what is to be considered offensive in the City. Evidently, cherry-picking history, to suit a racialised, economically conservative agenda, is now acceptable currency amongst the City’s ‘educated’ elite. 

Propaganda, it would seem, trumps truth.  While liberals will no doubt be elated at recent developments within campus politics, anti-racists would be wise to be cautious, as the triumph of those pushing an ideology that places race as the determining factor on which injustice is to be judged, has serious implications for the struggle for social and economic liberty. 

Advocates of the Rhodes Must Fall and Black Lives Matter groups paint a distorted picture of history and current affairs by airbrushing out inconvenient truths that conflict with their agenda. Focusing primarily on historic crimes committed against black people by white imperialists is to lose sight of the fact that black people have their own monsters too and that there will be no shortage of such monsters while the type of unfettered, hierarchical systems that produce them continue to exist.  In order to deny the historical fact of humanity’s common inhumanity – a revelation which compromises cultural nationalists’ claim of special status for black people as ‘the wretched of the earth’ – activists adopt a swivel-eyed approach to both past and present. This approach has inevitably burdened campaigners with an obligation of omertà when it comes to the victims of ‘modern’ slavery, even where a disproportionate number of the victims happen to be black and brown.

For all the radical posturing of Rhodes Must Fall/Black Lives Matter activists, the reality is that by racialising social and political issues at the expense of a progressive class analysis, they offer no threat to the economic system. This is why corporations, politicians and other establishment figures are more than happy to be associated with the BLM movement. A few more black faces at the top table, it has been concluded, is a small price to pay to ensure the future of capitalism (a logic that, we can be sure, hasn’t escaped the attention of the more ambitious activists).

Black lives, so the mantra goes, matter. Yet, even by their own race-obsessed identitarian standards, the city’s privileged protesters stand guilty of rank hypocrisy. The focus on historic, colonial injustices and a one-size-fits-all, US-media-driven narrative at the expense of acknowledging the ongoing, global suffering of millions of working class and impoverished black people, exposes the fraudulent nature of the project.

Furthermore, the absurd notion of ‘white privilege’ incanted by protesters who insist that all white people are advantaged over all black people, rings particularly hollow across the working class estates of East Oxford – especially when expressed by privileged black middle class students and their allies. Despite the odd, half-hearted nod to class inequality from the speaker’s platform, BLM/RMF protests have proved to be safe spaces for the incubation of racial bigotry; spaces where cries of ‘Fuck white people’ go uncontested and right-wing religious zealots hold court. Whatever the motivation of protest organisers, the message being received across the city is one of white = bad, black = good, and this has fostered an unprecedented atmosphere of racial tension. We are seeing the emergence of an ‘if you’re not with us, you’re against us’ online bullying culture, especially amongst young people. Within this environment, even the most stalwart critics of bigotry have been branded racist because they have not reposted BLM propaganda (and woe betide any youngster who dares to question the dominant narrative!). Ethnic nationalists on both sides will inevitably be rubbing their hands together with glee at the further prospect of racial disharmony.

Despite the ‘black lives matter’ rhetoric, campaigners have shown no interest in bringing the University to task over its continuing policy of accepting blood money from regimes that stand guilty of ongoing human rights abuses against black people. While I am not suggesting that Cecil Rhodes was anything other than a monstrous human being, the fact that dead white tyrants such as Rhodes are being held up to higher moral standards than latter day tyrants (of any skin tone), again, reveals inconsistency and a lack of joined-up thinking across the ‘educated’ side of the city. One could argue of course, that campaigners should not be bound to protest every injustice. Yet, as the protestors themselves have chosen to focus on the University’s links to individuals and systems that have profited from the brutal exploitation of black labour, this logic does not apply in this instance. It is more than legitimate to question why campaigners have restricted their attention to one particular historical figure, while ignoring other equally worthy candidates. A genuine movement that insists on the dignity of black lives would at least use the publicity generated by the Rhodes Must Fall campaign to highlight and challenge Oxford University’s current connections to brutal overseas governments.

A case in point would be Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, which is funded by the grotesque dictatorship of Saudi Arabia, a regime with an horrific domestic human rights record, a murderous foreign policy (aided and abetted by the UK government) and an unrivalled reputation as an exporter of Wahabi jihadism. 

The Saïd Business School was named in honour of billionaire arms dealer Wafic Saïd, who initially made his fortune in the Saudi construction industry where conditions of ‘near slavery’ and inhumane abuse have been condemned by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

Saïd was a close friend and significant financial supporter of British Conservative Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. He was especially vocal in his admiration for Thatcher’s campaign against the National Union of Miners in the 1984–85 Miners’ Strike. The war on the NUM was the first step toward the Thatcher administration’s ultimate goal of dismantling British heavy industry and privatising almost everything else. By destroying the NUM, which was widely considered to be the backbone of the trade union movement, and then picking off all other instruments of resistance, the Thatcher government gifted itself a free hand to implement its neoliberal economic policies. Thanks to the political decisions of Thatcher’s Conservative Government, enthusiastically supported by Wafic Saïd, many of our once proud and relatively prosperous working class communities have been transformed into post-industrial wastelands, with high unemployment and the type of acute social problems that would have been unimaginable a generation ago. 

The perfect complement to the Rhodes Must Fall campaign would then surely be a movement to put pressure on the Saïd Business School to change its name and on Oxford University to stop taking money from Saudi Arabia and other blood-soaked regimes that have istitutionalised human trafficking and forced labour. 

Taking into account his support for the UK Government’s decimation of coal mining communities, his profiteering from indentured servitude in the Middle East and his mercenary arms dealing, Wafic Saïd is the personification of unrestrained, ruthless capitalism. Allowing his name to be associated with a major institution in our city is to confer on him an air of undue legitimacy and credibility. A campaign to force the University to cut its links with Wafic Saïd and other dodgy donors would serve as a litmus test to gauge the sincerity of those that claim to be campaigning on behalf of human rights and social justice. Such a campaign would, I hope, be supported by the leader of Oxford City Council with as much enthusiasm as she has shown toward the Rhodes Must Fall and Black Lives Matter movements. 

Aside from the moral legitimacy of such a campaign, addressing the issues surrounding the Saïd Business School would present an opportunity to bring Town and Gown together to fight for a common cause. This could help educate students and locals away from a racialised, divisive view of the world, where grievance and counter grievance vie for attention in a race to the bottom. Such a campaign would also, more importantly, given the increasingly stormy political climate, help refloat progressive politics in the city, by serving as a lifeboat for those wanting to escape the dangerous waters of identity politics and racial separatism.