“I thought this place was all about free speech”: The Oxford Union, diamonds and the struggle for indigenous rights

The Oxford Union Society, which celebrates its bicentenary this year, is sometimes described as the “Home of Free Speech.” But as around 20 Union members’ guests - together with Union members themselves - discovered when an African Head of State visited in the mid-2000s, sometimes the Union will eject you just for wearing a t-shirt. . .

One evening some years back a Scottish woman in her late 20s was ordered off the premises of the world-famous Oxford Union Society in the UK for wearing a t-shirt underneath her jacket. This was especially bizarre not only because she hadn’t even had time to take the jacket off and therefore reveal the t-shirt, but because it happened at an institution considered by some people - not least the institution itself - to be one of the most fervent defenders of free speech worldwide. 

The woman, Miriam Ross, had been standing at the top of a white marble staircase just inside the front door of the Union’s Main Building in the centre of the bustling city of Oxford, where the Union has been based since the 1850s. What she had been pretending to do was wait to use the Ladies’ loo, located off the staircase about two-thirds of the way up. What actually she was doing was waiting for the President of one of Africa’s less-in-the-news countries, Botswana, to emerge from a reception room on the first floor before messaging me outside in the Union’s courtyard.

The reason for all this carry-on, back in October 2005, was simple: a subtle, non-disruptive, but still hopefully powerful protest organised by the UK-headquartered human rights organisation Survival International against Botswana’s appalling treatment of several 1000 indigenous Gana and Gwi “Bushmen” - or “San” or “Basarwa”, as they’re called in-country - from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR). Since the late 1990s, reportedly with the endorsement of the UK’s Foreign Office, government policy had been to evict the majority of the Bushmen from their territories into so-called “resettlement camps.” It was the same sad, tragic story that is playing itself out all over the world: indigenous peoples’ land stolen, plundered, contaminated and/or destroyed because people living elsewhere want to exploit the natural resources on, under or running through it.

In this case, the struggle was particularly emblematic, perhaps even iconic. The Bushmen are thought to have lived in Botswana and several other countries across southern Africa for at least 20,000 years. Along with tourism and conservation, one of the main reasons they were now being forced off their territories was to make way for diamond mining - Botswana being one of the world’s top producers and its economy heavily dependent on them. 

In other words, you could say it was a case of “Very, Very Old Tribe versus silly, so-called “luxury” commodity.” Could the clash have been any more grotesque? 

It had been a particularly critical time, mid-to-late 2005, in and around the CKGR. Bushman resistance was hotting up, with at least two groups of people trying to re-enter the reserve in order to take food and water to their families still living inside, and another group deciding to walk and ride donkeys out in an attempt to draw attention to what was going on there. That included armed police officers and wildlife scouts stopping the Bushmen from hunting and gathering, tending crops, collecting firewood and grazing their small flocks of goats. In late September, in recognition of their struggle, it was announced that the Bushmen’s grassroots organisation First Peoples of the Kalahari (FPK) and one of its founders, Roy Sesana, had won the Right Livelihood Award (RLA), sometimes dubbed the “Alternative Nobel Prize.”

FPK and Sesana won for their “resolute resistance against eviction from their ancestral lands”, the RLA stated at the time, “and for upholding the right to their traditional way of life.”

International resistance had been hotting up too, with a number of celebrities getting involved. A few months previously, British actress Julie Christie had attended a Survival-organised protest in support of the Bushmen outside the Natural History Museum in London where an exhibition sponsored by the diamond industry behemoth De Beers, which controlled mining in Botswana through a 50-50 partnership with the government, had just opened. A few days after that, Survival issued a press release saying that British model Lily Cole had told them that she wouldn’t work for De Beers again - “I was unaware of these matters when I was booked for the shoot” - and then in late September American journalist and political activist Gloria Steinem had been escorted out of the CKGR by armed police. 

Survival, for whom I had started working in July that year, was accusing Botswana’s government of a “full-scale crackdown.” In the four weeks leading up to the Oxford protest numerous Bushmen, including young children, had been arrested and imprisoned, while families had been evicted at gun-point from at least two CKGR locations, some people had been beaten, leaders threatened, and the two-way radios in each community - essential for allowing the Bushmen to communicate - confiscated. Most serious of all, though, was that Botswana’s authorities had started to shoot - with rubber bullets - at the Bushmen, leading to several people, including two children, being wounded.

This, then, had been the ultimate aim of our protest: to stop the Bushmen being shot at by drawing public attention to it. And what better place to make our voices heard than the Oxford Union, once described by UK Prime Minister - and former Union librarian - Harold MacMillan as “the last bastion of free speech in the Western world”? Almost certainly the most well-known debating society on the planet, the Union claims that it “believes first and foremost in freedom of speech: nothing more, nothing less”, that “diversity and outspokenness” are its “guiding principles”, and that this has always been the case since its foundation 200 years ago. Mainly renowned for its debates and talks on all kinds of serious political, economic, religious and cultural issues, over the years it has attracted an extraordinary number of famous people. When Botswana’s President, Festus Mogae, visited in 2005 he was following in the steps of 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.

But that evening when Mogae visited, Miriam Ross, much to her chagrin even to this day, didn’t quite manage to make her voice heard as planned. For 10 to 15 minutes she had stood at the top of that staircase in the Union’s Main Building doing her best to appear inconspicuous, while occasionally looking at her mobile phone. The plan was that she should remain there until it was obvious that the President was about to leave the reception room, before communicating that to me in the courtyard so that I and others could reveal the t-shirts that we were all wearing underneath our jackets or other tops just before Mogae crossed from the Main Building to the Debating Chamber, where he was due to speak. The timing was crucial: too slow to reveal the t-shirts and Mogae wouldn’t notice them, but too early and we would probably be thrown out before he did.

What was apparently so controversial about our t-shirts? In black capitals, they read: “BOTSWANA POLICE SHOOT BUSHMEN.” Those were the very same four words that Survival had put in an advert in The Independent that morning which we were also hoping Mogae might notice.

All around Ross, there at the top of that staircase, were impossible-to-miss signs of the Union’s illustrious past. Hanging on the staircase wall opposite her was a portrait of Lord Curzon, Union President in 1880, later the Viceroy of India and British Foreign Secretary. In front of her, the MacMillan Room, named after Harold. To her left, up a few more stairs, the Gladstone Room - named after another UK Prime Minister and Union President William Gladstone, whose political career had done so much to boost the Union’s prestige - where Mogae and the rest of his entourage were gathered.

“I stood there for quite a while with my phone out, pretending to be texting while waiting for the loo,” says Ross, Survival’s media officer for almost 10 years and my colleague for five. “This went on for quite some time.”

Suddenly she was approached by someone who she thought at the time was “a Union official”, although that was almost certainly incorrect. Over the course of the evening it would become clear that there was at least one out-of-uniform security detail operating. 

“He asked me what I was wearing under my jacket or jumper,” says Ross. “That sounds really bad, but it wasn't like that!”

The reason that this “official” asked such an odd - or even deeply inappropriate - question was because by then at least one person - out in the courtyard - had revealed their “BOTSWANA POLICE SHOOT BUSHMEN” t-shirt. Despite the fact they had been invited as a guest into the Union by a Union member, that person had just been evicted. Presumably Mogae, himself an Oxford University graduate who had received an honorary fellowship from his alma mater University College two years previously, didn’t want his return to the city to be spoiled, and presumably the powers-that-be didn’t want that either. Hence anyone wearing such an apparently inflammatory t-shirt - or anyone who had one on under something else - needed to be kicked out.

Ross could guess what was coming next.

“I think Kali was the first to reveal her t-shirt and be escorted out, although I’m not 100% sure of that,” she says, referring to Kali Mercier, a young New Zealander working as a researcher and campaigner for Survival who had spent months in Botswana supporting the Bushmen and their lawyer, British barrister Gordon Bennett, with a lawsuit that initially 240 of them had filed against the government three years earlier. “I remember she was treated a little roughly, perhaps manhandled slightly, and that the security guard called her a “fucking bitch” or something.”

In Ross’s own case, things weren’t at all confrontational. 

“The official was quite polite,” she says. “I said something back like, “The same t-shirt as the person who has just been chucked out” and he said something like, “Well, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave then.” That was the point at which I should obviously have revealed my t-shirt, for my exit, but being a person to whom the authority-baiting nature of stunts doesn’t really come naturally, in the heat of the moment, I forgot. Damn it, I still think now!”

Ross walked back down the staircase - with the Union “official” following closely behind her - and out into the courtyard where dozens of people were now milling about, most of them due to enter the Debating Chamber. I attempted to speak to her, but she pretended not to know me and strode briskly past.

“I remember then walking across the courtyard and you coming up to me asking what I was doing,” she says. “I looked straight ahead and said something like “Don't speak to me, I’ve been chucked out”, since you knowing me could have implicated you before you had the chance to reveal your t-shirt.”

Ross exited the Union’s premises through a heavy wrought iron gate onto St. Michael’s Street, which in one direction runs down to a more than 1,000 year old stone tower on Cornmarket Street, Oxford’s main shopping thoroughfare. As the evening drew on, more and more evicted protesters wearing “BOTSWANA POLICE SHOOT BUSHMEN” t-shirts, myself included, would congregate there.

“By the time Mogae visited the Union, the Bushmen's struggle had been part of my life for some years,” says Ross, who had travelled through the CKGR just after one of the main rounds of evictions in 2002. “I had recorded and transcribed hours of their testimony, spoken regularly to Bushman activist Jumanda Gakelebone on the phone, sent out many, many press releases, and spoken to countless journalists about the situation. I felt involved. I was proud to be there drawing attention to the Botswana government's disgraceful treatment of them, and to show Mogae that this issue wasn’t going to go away.”

Visiting the CKGR in 2002, together with Gakelebone, had meant going to some of the recently abandoned Bushmen settlements.

“Very sad,” she says. “I remember seeing the remains of their huts and a few abandoned belongings. The Bushmen didn't have many possessions, so they had clearly had to leave in a hurry. I can only imagine what that trip must have felt like for Jumanda, who was born and grew up in one of those places.”

Like other colleagues who had also visited Botswana - or who would visit in the future - Ross drew a sharp distinction between life in the CKGR and the “resettlement camps.”

“There were two small communities in the reserve where the people had totally refused to leave and so we spent a night or two in each of these, talking to the people there,” she says. “To me, the Kalahari seemed a harsh, though beautiful, environment, but to the Bushmen it was home and they were absolutely determined they were going to stay there. Jumanda also took me to the resettlement camps, and there too, again and again, I heard the same passionate determination - this time to go home.”

Three years later, out on St. Michael’s Street in Oxford, Ross found herself with at least two other protesters who by that point had been ejected too.

“I remember waiting in that street, with Marc [Kali Mercier’s husband] and Alexandra [Bagge, another Survival researcher and campaigner], I think, and two police coming up to us and asking for our details,” she says. “Then they said we didn't need to give them if we didn't want to, so we didn’t. They might have asked us why not, because I remember Alexandra giving them an explanation. A bit weird.”

Bagge had joined Survival just a few days beforehand. A British woman in her early 20s, she had been handing out leaflets and other campaign material bundled together in transparent A4 plastic wallets to the people queuing up to enter the Debating Chamber, and politely attempting to explain the Bushmen issue to them. Sometimes she was met with sincere interest or sympathy, sometimes short shrift. Like Mercier, she would go on to spend months in Botswana supporting the Bushmen and their lawyer with the court case.

“We were told we needed to move from the area,” Bagge says. “I remember walking out. I feel like I must have been told and I was very obedient and just went. It wasn’t the police, though. I only remember the police after we had left - questioning us. I don’t remember them removing anyone.”

Like her colleague Ross, Bagge hadn’t even got around to revealing her t-shirt before she was told to leave. All she had been doing was handing out those leaflets and other material, which she carried in a small, black backpack.

“I didn’t have my t-shirt out,” she says. “I don’t remember doing any kind of big reveal. So I was like, “What’s going on? What can I do now?””

Out on St. Michael’s Street Bagge, who would shortly start coordinating Survival’s weekly protests outside Botswana’s High Commission in London, found other protesters who had been removed. Together they started leafleting anyone coming out of the Union as well as passers-by, in addition to fending off questions from the police. 

“I remember there was a line of us and we were discussing the fact we didn’t have to give any information to the police about who we were - that they didn’t have a right to know our names or who we work for,” she says. “There were quite a few of us. We didn’t give them any information, but they were asking us.”

Only a few days into her time at Survival, Bagge remembers that evening as a “sort of baptism of fire.” It would take on even more meaning after visiting Botswana and spending time with the Bushmen in the CKGR as well as the dreaded “resettlement camps.”

“I’d gone into the Kalahari and seen the campfires and looked up at the stars while the Bushmen were telling stories and the children were running around,” she says. “It was them living their lives and there was this sense of freedom and even though you knew they were being restricted you got a sense of what life could be like for them. And then you went into these resettlement camps and there were these larger groups - 100s of people? I don’t know how many - and although there were some who did actually want to live there - some who had made a life there - it seemed really bleak. You’re being forced to live there, like in a refugee camp, and you’re making the best of the situation, but you’ve got no freedom. There wasn’t this kind of happiness, the storytelling, the laughter - a lot of laughter - that there was in the CKGR. You couldn't hear that in the resettlement camps we went to.”

One of the other protesters whom Bagge found out on St. Michael’s Street was Kali Mercier. Unlike Ross and Bagge’s experience with the police, hers was more fraught.  

“I remember a wrought iron gate and standing out there trying to pass the time by chatting to the police and explaining our cause to them and just getting such a cold shoulder that I was fuming,” Mercier says. “I was trying to have a logical, clear discussion with them, but they were being just such dicks. They wouldn’t relate to us at all like normal human beings - it was their whole tone of voice, like we were trespassers and therefore terrible people, and so they wouldn’t engage with us in any human way.”

Who did the powers-that-be think that we protesters - with our t-shirts, leaflets and generally polite, obedient dispositions - were exactly? Presumably not the “terrorist organisation” that the deputy chairman of Debswana, the company owned 50-50 by Botswana’s government and De Beers, once absurdly called Survival. 

“I remember being enraged at the police and being really annoyed that we weren’t allowed to be inside,” Mercier says. “And I was very proud of my t-shirt!”

Originally, the plan had been for her and as many other people as possible to reveal their t-shirts inside the Debating Chamber after Mogae had started speaking, with the majority sitting silently while a few designated individuals put up their hands to ask the President questions after the evening had been opened up to the audience. But that idea had been scuppered, to some extent, by an apparently last-minute decision by the Union to restrict attendance to members only, rather than following the usual rule or practice of allowing each member to bring in two guests.

“What drove me to keep going back to Botswana, and what motivated me to participate in that protest, was a huge sense of injustice that the Bushmen were being forced to move from their land, even though it was quite obviously destroying their lives, health, culture and livelihoods,” Mercier says. “Taking land away from indigenous people is the worst thing you can do because it essentially takes away their sense of identity and self. Growing up in New Zealand I knew the history of how Māori people had suffered when their land was stolen, and had seen first-hand how this was still affecting them today in the form of intergenerational trauma. I could see a terribly painful future in store for the Bushmen and felt so angry that those lessons hadn’t been learned from history.”

Like both Ross and Bagge, the difference between life in the CKGR and the “resettlements camps” was absolutely clear to Mercier.

“Those still clinging on to a life in the CKGR were living their lives according to their own wishes,” she says. “It wasn't an easy life, but it was one they loved. You could feel that in the air when you were there. They were fiercely independent, they were healthy, and they would go off into the desert for days and come back with food. There was a lot of lighthearted conversation around the campfire and snoozing under trees during the heat of the afternoon. The atmosphere in the resettlement camps couldn’t have been more different. There were fences and concrete buildings. People stayed at home all day, or drank themselves to oblivion on home-brew and wove around the streets yelling. AIDS was spreading and many people were sick. People were tired, miserable and defeated. It was heartbreaking.”

Another of the evicted protesters who found himself out on St. Michael’s Street that evening was Julian Kramer, a young German man working as Survival’s website manager. 

“I remember Kali being very upset,” he says. “She said she had been manhandled in quite an aggressive way and then thrown out. She was complaining how brutal they had been. I don’t remember that same level of brutality being applied to me personally.”

Kramer had taken off his jacket to reveal his t-shirt while standing in the Union’s courtyard. Almost immediately he was instructed to leave, together with a Chilean colleague who had worked at Survival for many years.

“Some sort of security guard approached and told us to leave the premises, and so we questioned that and said we have the right to protest,” he says. “Or something like that. I think they argued that it was Oxford University property and so eventually we were forced to go. It was robust, but it wasn’t as bad as what other people had told us about being chucked out.”

That claim about the Union’s premises wasn’t true. The majority of the buildings are actually owned by the Oxford Literary and Debating Union Trust whose origins can apparently be traced to a Union financial crisis in the 1960s and 1970s, and the subsequent decision to seek charitable status in order to raise money and pay off debts. 

Kramer remembers feeling “disappointed - more disappointed than annoyed” about what happened that evening, mainly because it dispelled an idea he had held for so long about the UK.

“When we grew up in Germany we always had this idea of freedom of speech in Britain being this really big thing, being sacrosanct and above everything else,” he says. “But what we experienced that evening was freedom of speech being curtailed, probably with the knowledge of the UK government. It was quite shocking. I was brought up by my Dad in particular to say what I think and not be stopped by anyone. If I think something and really believe in it, then I shouldn’t allow anyone to tell me I’m not allowed to think it. In my Dad’s case that came from his experience of being a child in the Third Reich and the idea that that should never happen again, and therefore free speech is very, very important.”

The fact that so many protesters in the courtyard or elsewhere were being ejected - Ross, Bagge, Mercier, Kramer, our Chilean colleague, myself etc - didn’t stop some from making their voices heard inside the Debating Chamber - the Union’s inner sanctum. By the time Botswana’s President et al had trooped in, the Chamber - whose foundation stone had been laid back in 1878 - was packed. Union President Chris Farmer, from St. Hugh’s College, opened proceedings by standing up and introducing Mogae, who subsequently began a speech titled “Globalisation and Good Governance.” Given what his government was doing to the Bushmen, that title could hardly have been more ironic.

After Mogae finished his speech, one of the first people chosen by him to ask a question was a young woman named Maya, a Union member, third year Somerville College student and, far from coincidentally, the eldest daughter of Survival’s director Stephen Corry - not that Botswana’s President would have known that. Her first question, asked standing up, was about the Bushmen and presumably intended to lull Mogae into a false sense of security: something about whether he was pleased with the recent “Alternative Nobel Prize” victory by some of his countrymen. Her second question was much tougher: something about those same Bushmen being imprisoned only a few days before winning that award, which she asked just before revealing her “BOTSWANA POLICE SHOOT BUSHMEN” t-shirt that up to that point she had concealed under something else. Around the same time, at least three other people sitting with or near her stood up too and took off their tops to reveal yet more of the same t-shirts. 

“I remember milling about beforehand and having that funny feeling when you know you’re about to do something a bit naughty or draw attention to yourself,” Maya says. “I had been wearing something fairly innocuous - a black jumper and jeans, I think. You didn’t really have to dress up to go to the Union.”

According to Maya, a security man appeared “incredibly quickly” behind her and the others, grabbed someone’s arm, and told them to leave.

“I can’t remember whose arm they grabbed, but they grabbed somebody and leant down and said, “You need to leave now” or something to that effect,” she says. “We were removed very quickly. Mogae clearly had an entourage of people and some of them were large blokes who looked like security, and who were behaving like security, scanning the room and so on. I certainly don’t remember what seemed to be external security at other events. For example, somebody like Salman Rushdie, who as history has recently proved, probably had much greater cause to surround himself with security. . . There was nothing like that when he spoke [at the Union four days later].”

Maya is convinced that she was told to leave because of the t-shirt and not for any other reason, such as standing up for longer than usual after asking her questions or because the others next to her had stood up as well, despite not being invited to ask a question.

“My strong impression is that we would have been asked to leave regardless,” she says. “It felt as if as soon as there was any indication of disruption the security people moved, and I don't remember any suggestion that we were first asked to sit down again, or that was an option. Their intention was clearly to swiftly eject us. There wasn’t any ambiguity about that.”

Until that moment, Maya had assumed she would be immune from being thrown out because she was a Union member. 

“There was definitely this sense of, “Well, they can’t make us leave” and “We’re guaranteed access to this inner sanctum because we’re members,”” she says.

One of the other protestors sitting with Maya was her good friend Sarah Hall, another Union member and Somerville student. 

“I was a bit nervous,” Hall says. “We knew there would be some kind of immediate response because there was so much security there, so I remember that moment of, “Ok, we’re really going ahead with this” and then doing it. We didn’t say or do anything else. We literally just took off our tops to reveal those t-shirts with the slogans and we were ushered out. Some very intimidating security people came over and told us we had to leave, and so we did. It was very heavy-handed the way it all played out.”

Like Maya, Hall was sure that she was removed for wearing the t-shirt - not for any other reason. 

“I don’t think sitting down would have made a difference,” she says. “I wasn’t asked to sit down. From what I remember, as soon as we revealed our t-shirts they were very swift in getting us out of there.”

Outside, Hall felt “really outraged that we could be booted out”, especially since she was a member.

“It was interesting to me that the Union didn’t seem to want to protect members from being able to express an opposing view to this person who clearly had questions to answer,” she says. “Mogae had been brought in and yet we weren’t even allowed to express any dissent. They really didn’t seem worried about freedom of speech at all.”

Hall didn’t think that these “very intimidating security people”, as she called them, were hired by the Union.  

“The Union was this sort of pathetic, Etonian, grand-standing sort of place and I don’t think they would have had that kind of security there,” she says. “It seemed really incongruous, because most of the events were really silly.”

But if the security wasn’t put on by the Union itself, then who were they exactly and on whose authority had they been acting? 

A few days afterwards, a short article in The Independent pointed the finger at British police and claimed that Mogae had “watched Special Branch eject [“a couple of guests”, which was false] from the room”, before saying that the Union’s President Farmer “blamed” “Special Branch” for what happened and that “he intended to study a security video of proceedings before taking the matter further.” Subsequently, a comment article in one of the Oxford University student newspapers, The Oxford Student, alleged that it was “Union stewards” who had thrown out the protesters and initially suggested they may have done so because they were “under pressure from the Botswana government”, before saying that Farmer denied the latter and seemed to imply that ultimately “Special Branch” was responsible. 

“When dealing with eminent speakers, Union employees fall under explicit direction from Special Branch, a section of the police force which provides protection for public figures,” the Oxford Student comment article claimed. “If Special Branch are allowed to act at their own discretion every time an important public figure comes to The Union, our freedom of speech could be violated every time someone really worth challenging is speaking.”

Certainly, a Special Branch - but whose exactly? - being involved shouldn’t have come as a surprise. The year before, Home Secretary David Blunkett had put his name to a “Guidelines on Special Branch Work in the United Kingdom” which stated that, although their current “main focus” is “countering terrorism and other extremist activity”, “Special Branches. . . have important roles in the provision of personal protection for VIPs and Royalty” too. 

But if a Special Branch really was responsible, it raises a tantalising-although-obvious question: how can the Union claim to respect free speech if, every now and again, it permits the police to evict someone because that person is saying or doing something in the Debating Chamber, courtyard or elsewhere on the Union’s premises that is making or might make one of the speakers feel uncomfortable? That is even more disturbing if, as in our case, that person is merely wearing a t-shirt, handing out leaflets, asking a question after being invited to do so or ostensibly waiting for the loo, and doesn’t disrupt proceedings. Our protest, it is worth emphasising, was not only carried out by Union members’s guests - as well as a few Union members themselves - but didn’t interrupt events and was nowhere near as confrontational as certain prior or subsequent actions. We didn’t hiss, interrupt, barrack, stamp our feet and drown out the speaker, and nor did we throw flour and balloons, put a brick through the window or let a noose down from the gallery, as has all happened in the past. Neither did we shout out during the speeches, throw leaflets around the Debating Chamber, or glue ourselves to the floor and halt things for 20 minutes or so, as happened earlier this year when British academic Kathleen Stock visited. In 1978, when former US President Richard Nixon came down St. Michael’s Street on his way to the Union, he was greeted with chants of “Arrest Nixon” and at least one placard reading “If you can't just die just fade away.” By contrast, the slogan “BOTSWANA POLICE SHOOT BUSHMEN” almost seemed too tame, too polite. . . 

Another of the protesters sitting in the Debating Chamber with Maya and Sarah Hall that evening was Maya’s younger sister, Amie, a 19 year old recent school-leaver who had snuck in by borrowing a Union member’s pass belonging to one of her elder sister’s friends. According to Amie, initially wearing a black winter coat to conceal her “BOTSWANA POLICE SHOOT BUSHMEN” t-shirt, it was she who had been accosted by security.

“Someone definitely grabbed my upper arm,” she says. “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, especially because I was just 19 and he was burly, like a night club security man.” 

As Amie remembers it, she and the others didn’t leave immediately. 

“Maya was asking “Are you asking us to leave? Are you asking us to leave?” - louder the second time round,” she says. “This was in response to security saying fairly quietly, “We’re going to have to ask you to leave.””

Outside, Amie felt “extremely affronted” - “Did that just happen? What the fuck just happened? How dare he!” - and joined in with the other ejected protesters on St. Michael’s Street handing out leaflets. 

“I clearly remember that too because there was a really mixed response,” she says. “Someone said to me - you know, someone extremely posh, “It’s unacceptable to behave like that in a space like that”, or something along those lines. They were mortally offended. They were completely wrapped up in this idea that the Union is some kind of sacred space to allow the most important people in the world to tell their stories. I guess their evening had been disrupted. It was like being on a train full of rowdy people: that was what it felt like for these people, that was not what they went to the Union for. I don’t know really what they did go for, though, because I’m sure they got nothing out of the speech.”

For Amie the protest felt “personal.” Running for about 10 years by that point, Survival’s campaign had included supporting the Bushmen with their lawsuit, regularly sending press releases to 1,000s of journalists worldwide denouncing Botswana’s government, and calling for an international boycott on tourism in Botswana, as well as a boycott of their diamonds and De Beers. As a result, Amie’s father, Stephen, Survival’s director, had been personally vilified. Satirical cartoons of him had appeared in Botswana’s media, and once during a TV interview he was told that he was at risk of being beaten up. His face had even graced the front page of the Daily News newspaper with the headline “Corry’s campaign irks MPs” alongside an article saying how Botswana’s politicians had taken turns in the country’s Parliament to “dismiss Corry as a “devil, liar and a loose cannon.””

“It had got very pretty personal with Dad - those satirical cartoons - and I think he had been banned from entering the country,” says Amie, who later would wear her offending t-shirt as a pyjama top. “And Roy [Sesana, from FPK, the Bushman with the highest international profile] had been to stay with us a number of times. So it felt personal. And it felt very emotional. I felt those tensions. I didn’t just feel like I was there as a decoy. I was there because I wanted to be, and because it really mattered.”

If Botswana’s President thought that Amie et al being thrown out of the Debating Chamber meant the protest was over, he would have been wrong. Still more was to come. On leaving, Mogae came back into the courtyard again where he was greeted by yet more protesters unveiling yet more “BOTSWANA POLICE SHOOT BUSHMEN” t-shirts. Among them was Portia Asquith, Stephen Corry’s personal assistant and a great-great-granddaughter of UK Prime Minister - and another former Union President - Herbert Asquith, whose portrait also hung on the staircase in the Union’s Main Building, along with Curzon. Asquith had been in Botswana recently, but just four weeks beforehand she was forced to flee after it was announced on a radio station there that the “foreigners” supposedly inciting the Bushmen were going to be arrested.

“I remember there being a lot of waiting around and a lot of anticipation,” she says. “It felt quite busy. It felt like there were lots of people milling around.”

Like other protesters that evening, Asquith was convinced there were undercover police mingling in the crowd. Undercover Bobbies, whether inside the Debating Chamber or outside in the courtyard, certainly wouldn’t have been a first for the Union at debates or talks when potential trouble was expected.

“There were definitely other people who were nothing to do with Survival just standing there waiting - and they had spotted us,” she says. “My memory is of lurking in the courtyard but being really, in retrospect, indiscreet. I remember Dad being there too - there were a few of us - and it must have been so obvious that we were up to something. I remember noticing these other people who weren’t to do with Survival at all - plainclothes policemen - also lurking around, so there was a kind of uneasy atmosphere.”

The tension broke when Mogae finally emerged. 

“It felt like such a long time but when he did, we removed our coats to reveal our t-shirts,” she says. “One of the things that really struck me - which I was really impressed with - was that Dad shouted out to Mogae: “Shame on you!”” 

Asquith, who would later wear her “BOTSWANA POLICE SHOOT BUSHMEN” t-shirt while jogging around London at lunchtimes with her colleague Miriam Ross, was removed from the Union immediately. 

“One of the people who had been lurking who I thought was a plainclothes policeman came up to me,” she says. “He was incredibly intimidating - he was very big, and he got very, very close to me. I can’t remember what else he said, but he was like “Get out, get out!” It was a kind of physical intimidation. We were taken out. I ended up leaving my bag behind in the courtyard. Outside, I remember Mum saying: “Thank goodness, I thought you and Dad were going to be arrested!””

Like her colleagues Mercier and Bagge, one of Asquith’s roles in Botswana had been to support the Bushmen with their lawsuit against the government. Another was to take a BBC TV crew into the CKGR. 

“Having witnessed first-hand the conditions the Bushmen had been forced into - dependency on government hand-outs, loss of their ancestral lands and connection to their ancestors, and humiliation, with the inevitable result of addiction and poor mental health - it was imperative for me to give voice to their plight by protesting at the Union that day,” she says. “I was most concerned about the women - the ones who had returned to the CKGR in spite of the government threats and torture. They were the ones who were bringing up the children while many of the men, stripped of their identity, resorted to alcohol in the relocation camps. It was mostly the women who were keeping alive their traditions, way of life and resistance to the government’s policies of eradicating how the Bushmen choose to live. I was inspired by their strength, determination and quiet persistence to resist Botswana’s government.”

Asquith’s father, Kip, Herbert Asquith’s great-grandson, was removed from the Union’s premises that evening too.

“When Festus was due to come out I was there with a group of people, in the semi-darkness, although there were garden lights on,” says Kipper, then in his early 60s. “There were police there too. I remember a female constable who obviously thought I looked fairly innocent and so didn’t object to my being there - I still had my Mackintosh on over my t-shirt.”

Not for long, though. As soon as he saw that Mogae was approaching, Kipper removed his coat to reveal his t-shirt and started heckling. The female constable immediately swung into action.

“As he came out, I took the MacKintosh off and I shouted something like “Shame on you!” and so forth, and after a bit she said “All right, sir, you’ve had your say” and so then we were ushered out.”

It still wasn’t over for Mogae, though, not quite. Just as he was about to enter the doorway leading back into the Union’s Main Building, a man standing there revealed yet another - perhaps the very last the President would see that evening - “BOTSWANA POLICE SHOOT BUSHMEN” t-shirt. This was Stephen Corry himself - Maya and Amie’s father, and Survival’s director since 1984. No doubt about it, no one man or woman had done more to tarnish the Botswana government’s generally positive reputation than him. Indeed, the Union itself, in an advert in The Oxford Student billing Mogae’s forthcoming appearance, had described Botswana as “the most stable democracy in sub-Saharan Africa and one of Africa’s most striking “success stories.””

“I positioned myself where Mogae, afterwards, would walk out of the Chamber and into the nearest building or college or whatever it is that’s nearby,” says Corry. “I knew this was the only route he could take, and so I basically just leant against the door there and waited. Then Mogae came out with his entourage which principally consisted of Lord Somebody or Other who was the Something of Oxford. He was someone quite well-known. Or had been. Mogae appeared with two or three other people and walked towards me to go through the door - at which point, I took my suit jacket off, and there was my t-shirt saying “BOTSWANA POLICE SHOOT BUSHMEN.””

According to Corry, Mogae was visibly shocked, although it isn’t clear if he recognised him as Survival’s director. 

“He was literally two feet away from me,” Corry says. “There was nothing else he could do because I was leaning against the door, and so as they were going through it he couldn't avoid seeing me. I know they were expecting problems because they laid on extra security, and, of course, they knew about Survival’s campaign because we were protesting outside Botswana’s High Commission every week, but Botswana is a very deferential society. The government enjoys enormous deference. Criticising it was just something you don’t do. I think the whole thing - the protest, so carefully-crafted, extremely narrowly-targeted, almost a silent protest - was shocking for Mogae. He clearly looked shocked.”

What happened next was predictable: Corry, the director for more than 20 years of a respected human rights organisation with considerable international profile, was immediately ejected from the Union. 

“One of the heavies approached me and began to manhandle me off the premises,” he says. “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. I mean, had this man not used any force at all, I would have still been in there. He needed to use force to move me.”

Corry reckons that this was as roughly as he was ever treated in a human rights career ultimately spanning five decades, despite visiting some of the most lawless, violent regions of the world. Some years later, in Oxford coincidentally, after being invited to give a talk to one of the University’s societies, he finished by offering a prize to the first person who could answer a question that ran something like this:

“I’ve been doing this work since 1972 and I’ve been in all kinds of countries where indigenous people get shot and killed for all kinds of different things, but there’s only one place where I’ve actually been physically manhandled out of an area. Guess where?” 

“Eventually,” Corry says, “someone did pipe up with “Oxford” and I said, “Yes, the Oxford Union.””

Corry is adamant that Survival’s strategies were justified and the protest that evening was successful, in the sense that neither he nor his colleagues ever received any more reports of anyone being shot. It would have been no good just campaigning for land rights, he says, if there was no one left to live on that land.

“They had shot at a bunch of Bushmen trying to go back inside the CKGR and they shot at them with baton rounds, which of course can kill people,” he says. “That escalated the whole thing. Suddenly it wasn’t really any more a question of whether they had the right to be in the CKGR - it was whether they were going to be killed or not. When the shooting started, we had to re-think things. We had to stop it, we had to ensure there was no repetition. Hence the advert in The Independent, and hence the protest at the Union that evening with those t-shirts.”

Just as Corry was being so rudely removed, though, Survival’s then director, now retired, was able to fire off one parting shot. 

“I remember this quite clearly,” he says. “I managed to say, as Mogae etc were going up the stairs inside, “I thought this place was all about free speech”, to which Lord Somebody or Other replied - and I remember it word for word, “Well, that just shows how little you know.” I thought that pretty much summed the whole thing up.”

Post script

The following year, December 2006, the Bushmen won their court case against Botswana’s government in what was described at the time as a remarkable legal victory. Botswana’s High Court ruled that the government’s eviction of the Bushmen was “unlawful and unconstitutional”, that they have the right to live on their ancestral land in the CKGR, that they have the right to hunt and gather there, and that they have the right to enter the reserve without permits. The government didn’t appeal the ruling, but has done “everything it can to obstruct it”, according to Survival International. Since then, the Bushmen have filed further lawsuits against the government, one of which was referred to Botswana’s Court of Appeal which subsequently described the government’s treatment of the Bushmen as “degrading.”

An estimated 500-600 Bushmen continue to live in the CKGR, despite ongoing challenges, periodic persecution and the apparently vindictive behaviour of the government. They struggle to access regular water supplies and are sometimes harassed while hunting, and one family was recently refused permission to bury an elder, Pitseng Gaoberekwe, on his ancestral land in the reserve. In December 2022 the United Nations’ Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination raised serious concerns about the treatment of the CKGR Bushmen, urging the government to “fully implement the High Court’s [2006] decision by allowing all ethnic groups originating from this reserve to return and settle there unconditionally” and “to provide them with effective access to basic social services and enable them to resume their traditional activities without hindrance.”

In 2007 a diamond deposit concession at a place called Gope, a Bushman community, was sold by De Beers, now majority-owned by mining giant Anglo-American, to the UK-based Gem Diamonds, which subsequently opened a mine there, renamed as “Ghaghoo”, although reports this year suggest that the company may close and/or sell it due to low diamond prices. Earlier this year Botswana media reported that “about half” of the CKGR “has been allotted into blocks for exploration for oil, gas, coal, coal bed methane, and other minerals and metals.”

To date, my attempts to confirm whether a Special Branch really was responsible in some way for what happened that evening at the Oxford Union in 2005, as alleged, have been inconclusive. The Metropolitan Police in London told me “Not aware we were involved in this” when I asked them about it, while Thames Valley Police, the more likely candidate, said that they are unable to provide an on-the-record reply.