Uncomfortable Oxford: meet the student group asking the city to confront its colonial past

This week in Oxford, the governors of Oriel College voted to recommend the removal of its statue of Cecil Rhodes, an imperialist, white supremacist and benefactor of Oriel itself. The decision followed a passionate but intermittent student-led campaign, Rhodes Must Fall, which was reignited earlier this month by the Black Lives Matter movement.

Between 2016, when the first protests against memorials to Rhodes spread from Cape Town to Oxford, and this May, when the killing of George Floyd led to those protests’ resurgence, many of the conversations about Rhodes and his legacy had fallen silent. But not all.

Meet Uncomfortable Oxford, a student-run social enterprise dedicated to raising awareness about the more “uncomfortable” aspects of the city’s history. Their method is education, rather than political activism. Since 2018, they have been running walking tours around the city centre several times a week, using visual cues from the buildings to engage people in stories that too often go untold.

Co-founders Paula Larsson and Olivia Durand, now doctoral students in History, met at a university summer-school for public engagement in 2018. “At the time we were both quite frustrated at how disengaged academia at Oxford seemed to be from the outside world,” Larsson told me, when I spoke to them both earlier this week. “And then Olivia had this great idea.”

The original concept the pair invented was for a “postcolonial tour” of Oxford, based on one that Olivia had recently discovered in Berlin. But when they began to dig around, they found that the things that troubled them about Oxford’s history went far beyond its imperial ties.

They now run five different tours on “uncomfortable” themes, ranging from finance – exploring the ethics of donation through buildings named for contentious individuals, such as the Sackler Library – to women, whose long exclusion from the city’s academic spaces have rendered them largely hidden figures in its history.

When they launched the tours in October 2018, at the IF festival of science and ideas, they were immediately popular.

“It went from 15 people showing up for the first tour to 82 on the final day,” Durand recalls. Larsson adds: “Everyone was asking, ‘When are you doing the next one?’” Since then, the team has grown, and numbers more than 30 students, who run the tours on a part-time basis. Discomfort is here to stay.

To anyone unfamiliar with Oxford, the memorialisation of a figure like Rhodes might appear an unfortunate aberration in a city otherwise devoted to the pursuit of enlightenment. But the skyline is studded with reminders of injustice.

Waqas Mirza, a doctoral student in English and French literature who joined Uncomfortable Oxford soon after its creation, points me (virtually) to the Oxford Martin School on Broad Street as an example.

Founded in 1883, the building was formerly home to the Indian Institute, which functioned as a training ground for the Indian Civil Service, the organisation that effectively ran India when it was a British colony. Lecturers were required to teach Indian history, but only beginning at the start of British rule. The university dissolved the institute in 1956, less than 10 years after independence.

“One interpretation of this story is that as soon as Britain started losing control of India, the interest that Oxford had in Indian history started to disappear,” Mirza says. “The idea was essentially that you need to know India to rule it effectively. Knowledge was desirable only in order to govern.” For an institution apparently dedicated to learning, this leaves a rather sour taste.

Larsson points out that a large portion of the original donations for the building came from Indian princes. “It’s interesting in light of an argument we often hear for not removing the Rhodes statue – that we’ve got to respect the donor’s wishes.” The statue is part of the commemoration Rhodes would have expected in return for the enormous endowment he left Oriel on his death.

“But the donors’ wishes in this case were specifically for a building in Oxford where the study of their own country would take place. Those wishes were not respected when the university evicted it.”

Another Uncomfortable Oxford tour happens at the Ashmolean Museum on Beaumont Street. Thanks to the boom in European exploration in the 17th century when the Ashmolean was founded (it’s the oldest public museum in Britain), its collections are closely tied to the uncomfortable legacy of the British Empire. Many of its exhibits were “collected” without permission from or compensation to their original owners.

One such exhibit is known as Powhatan’s Mantle. A native American wall-hanging made from deer skin and embroidered with shells, it was brought to England from what was then the colony of Virginia at some point in the 17th century. According to the Ashmolean, it is “widely believed to have been gifted from Chief Powhatan for King James I”, but Larsson contends that the animosity between the Jamestown settlers and Powhatan, who led the resistance against them, makes this implausible. The mantle was given to the Ashmolean by the Tradescant family, who were known “adventurers” of the period.

Today, some of its shells are missing. Early visitors would often take one home with them as a souvenir from their day in the museum. “As an object,” Larsson says, “it really speaks to this problematic idea that ‘to hold, to contain, to have’ is a big part of the way we are used to experiencing history. It speaks to the human need for souvenirship. That’s what a museum really is.”

For a final example of how discomfort is embedded in the landscape of the city, we return to Oriel (again, virtually). One stop on the Hidden Figures tour, which uncovers the histories of women in Oxford, is a small stone outside the porters’ lodge at the entrance to the college. It’s the spot where washerwomen left the students’ laundry when the college statutes prohibited women from entering college grounds. They couldn’t even be officially recorded on the college payroll.

The first woman appears on Oriel’s records in 1657 and is referred to as “Widow Cuckoo”. She cleaned the chapel. “Is she the widow of Cuckoo, or was she cuckoo herself?” muses Durand. “Was it her real name, or a nickname, or a slur?” As so often when it comes to women’s history, no-one bothered to write it down.

Another argument often made in opposition to the removal of statues of awful people is that to do so is to erase history. But scratching around the archives for women’s stories has suggested to Durand a confounding idea: the single viewpoint offered by statues are themselves an erasure of history. For every Oxford man memorialised, on a plinth or in a street name, how many women are forgotten?

The same is true of Oxford’s literary heritage. “Ask anyone about writers who went to Oxford,” Mirza says, “and the first people who come to mind are JRR Tolkien and Lewis Carroll.”

But there are plenty of others worthy of recognition. For example, Dorothy L Sayers, who translated Dante and wrote a series of enormously popular detective novels in the Twenties, or Compton Mackenzie, author of the 1947 comic masterpiece Whisky Galore (and co-founder of the Scottish National Party).

Mirza wonders why no one mentions Dambudzo Marechera, who won the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1979. The Zimbabwean author was allegedly expelled from New College for trying to burn down his room because he was feeling too cold. For entertainment value alone, it’s bizarre that this story isn’t told more.

“Our goal is to create systemic change in some form,” Larsson says, “and to make people who come to Oxford – those 9 million tourists and those thousands and thousands of students who pass through it every year – see it in a different way. We don’t want them to see it as Boris Johnson’s Oxford. It doesn’t need to be an old boy’s club any more."

But as the Black Lives Matter protests have highlighted, systemic change is hard to achieve and harder to quantify. Uncomfortable Oxford measures its impact in a variety of ways – through the numbers of people who have been on one of their tours (now up to around 3,500), or who have downloaded their new podcast series, A Very Brief Introduction to the British Empire, which is hosted by doctoral students in History.

They are also finding the university itself to be increasingly cooperative. Individual staff members often come on the tours, and some have even booked them for their students as part of the curriculum. Staff from other universities visiting for conferences are starting to book as part of their stay.

And several university institutions have begun reaching out for partnerships: both the Ashmolean and Wadham College have their own Uncomfortable tours, and St John’s College are in the process of developing one. (Even so, as an organisation, they are also keen to emphasise their independence from the university.)

In general, when it comes to difficult historical artefacts, Uncomfortable Oxford advocates “contextualisation”, which might include putting up plaques or removing objects to museums. In the case of Rhodes Must Fall, their overall position is clear – “of course we want the statue to come down,” Larsson says, with Mirza adding: “A plaque wouldn't address the fact that the statue is celebratory by virtue of being elevated” – but they’re reluctant to go into specifics, stressing that the voices that need to be heard on the issue should come from within the movement itself and from students of colour within the university.

“At the end of the day, we’re not a political organisation,” Mirza says. “We’re not activists, we’re not a campaign, we’re an educational social enterprise. Our main goal is to contextualise and to raise awareness about Oxford’s different legacies. We want to communicate information, rather than deliver a message.”

Since the killing of George Floyd, Britain has begun to grapple with its own “uncomfortable” history. But as Larsson emphasises, they expect change to happen “very, very, very slowly.” All three of these students are in the final year of their doctorates. So what happens to Uncomfortable Oxford when they graduate? Their work is clearly far from done. “Oh, we’re staying,” Mirza says.

For more information, visit Uncomfortable Oxford