50 Years and Counting

Leading academics Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr, Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Professor Wole Soyinka discussed five decades of societal change and friendship at a University of Cambridge panel event

“I didn’t know what I wanted to study, but I wanted the experience of living in a predominantly white culture other than the United States - whose relationship to slavery and Jim Crow racism was completely different than that in the United States.”

Literary scholar Professor Henry Louis ‘Skip’ Gates Jr, the first African American to be awarded a Paul Mellon Fellowship, told a Cambridge University audience he’d arrived at Clare College in 1973, looking for a “an opportunity to discover myself”.

And the first thing he was surprised to discover was a reversal in how he was viewed by others. Unlike in the United States, he said, in Cambridge people saw him as American first, rather than Black.

“I became an American here. People would say to me, ‘You Americans are all the same’. And I would say, ‘I beg your pardon?’”

Professor Gates, Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah and Professor Wole Soyinka recalled the Cambridge of the early 1970s during the wide-ranging ’50 Years and Counting’ panel discussion at Lady Mitchell Hall.

“There were no Black people at Clare when I came up,” said Prof Gates. “The first person I met here said ‘What do you want to read?’, and slipped into the conversation, ‘Do you know Anthony Appiah?’ The next day another person asked me, ‘By the way do you know Anthony Appiah?’ On the third day I was walking through Old Court and I saw this Black man with a huge amount of hair and a big cowboy hat, and I went up to him and I said, ‘I don’t know anything else about you, but I bet my bottom dollar that your name is Anthony Appiah.'”

Professor Appiah, a leading academic in literary and cultural studies, who studied philosophy at Clare College, explained that his own arrival at Cambridge was “pure good fortune”. “I decided I wanted to be a doctor so I applied to Cambridge because my father said that’s where I should go.”

Playwright and Nobel Laureate in Literature, Professor Soyinka, was an Overseas Fellow at Churchill College, in exile from Nigeria, when he became Skip’s supervisor. “It was ironic,” he told the audience, “because I came to Cambridge looking for peace.”

The friends described a university environment, away from the tumult of the wider world, in which class and student status could insulate Black undergraduates from racial prejudice.

“I have an English mother, I grew up going to English schools, and I think there were enormous protections for dealing with racism from the class position of my English family,” said Professor Appiah. “I came at this at a very odd slant, but I’m not saying everything was perfect.”

“I think my generation came on the cusp of the transition between class and actual race,” Prof Soyinka added. “As a student, I found that students were treated as an exotic class in themselves.

“But the transition came with the influx of the West Indian armada of cheap labour. And that’s when our stock fell – from princes to labourers. Even some of our own people absorbed this, students now saw themselves as a class, and almost a race apart from the working class Black people. It was only when the race riots stared that the gap closed.”

But within academic subjects themselves, inequalities were very clear. Prof Soyinka recalled being told he would not be teaching African literature in the English Faculty – because African literature was not viewed as literature.

“There was a kind of quizzical exchange in the Faculty, I remember. I can’t quite recall the conversation, but it ended up with my being sent to see the head of Anthropology. Then I discovered they didn’t mind one talking about African literature, but only as an anthropological phenomenon. And that’s how I ended up in the Department of Anthropology. That’s how African literature was defined at Cambridge in the 1970s. They just didn’t accept there was any such creature as African literature.”

“I was told I couldn’t write about African literature,” Prof Gates added. “But I could write about European reactions to the first Black writers in the Enlightenment, when whether or not Africans were truly human in the same way Europeans were was a matter of great dispute throughout Europe.”

The panel – who in the same week were awarded honorary degrees by the University – said much progress had been made in widening participation in Higher Education, including at Cambridge.

“Let’s start with the dramatic changes that have occurred in Cambridge over the past four years, under the leadership of Vice-Chancellor Stephen Toope,” said Prof Gates, citing new programmes such as the “revolutionary” Cambridge Foundation Year, the Alexander Crummell Scholarships at Queens’ College, and the Gloria Carpenter Lecture. “These things are symbolic,” he said “but there is enormous trickle down importance.”

“Universities are global institutions and should reflect the character of the human world,” said Prof Appiah. “In a place like Cambridge, with a history like this, part of the challenge is that you can’t really think about cosmopolitan diversity without thinking about the challenge of class in the UK. It keeps not just many people of colour out, but also a lot of very talented white people, because the codes they have to master are hoarded in institutions that are overwhelmingly upper middle class and white. I mentioned my privilege, in part, to say that I think that we can’t disentangle racial issues from issues of privilege.”

Referring to the wider public debate on increasing diversity at top universities, Prof Appiah said: “It seems to me a certain amount of coverage is written by people completely unwilling to do the thinking necessary to understand why changing things here is not just ‘woke’ or giving advantage to people who don’t deserve it, and to explain why there’s a problem and why the attempts being made to solve it are rational, rather than just having a reflex endorsement of reactionary objections to anything that looks like change.”

As moderator Dr Gillian Tett, Editor-at-Large, US, of the Financial Times drew the discussion to a close, she asked the three academics what advice they would give to today’s Cambridge students.

“Read, read a lot outside your immediate discipline. It will give you a broad mind,” said Prof Soyinka.

Professor Appiah added: “Take advantage of the place; the great thing that Cambridge can give you is each other.”

Professor Gates urged students to pick a career that allowed them to pursue a subject they love.  “I was raised by my mother to be a medical doctor, raised by my father to be a lawyer, and it took this lot to reveal to me that all along I really wanted to be what we used to call ‘a man of letters’. To be paid to read and write books and be surrounded by brilliant students. I had to come 3,000 miles to have that revelation.”

Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah (Clare 1972)

Kwame Anthony Appiah was born in London and shortly after moved to Ghana with his family. Following an undergraduate degree in philosophy at Clare College Cambridge, he taught at the University of Ghana, then returned to Cambridge to undertake a PhD.

Since studying at Cambridge, Professor Appiah has taught at Yale, Cornell, Duke, and Harvard universities, and lectured at many other institutions in the USA, France, Germany, Ghana, and South Africa. He is an honorary Fellow at Clare College, and has recently been appointed President of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

He has published widely in literary and cultural studies, with a focus on African and African-American culture. His current interests range over African and African-American intellectual history and literary studies, ethics, the connections between moral philosophy and psychology, and political philosophy and the philosophy of the social sciences; and he has also taught regularly about African traditional religions.

Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Clare 1973)

Henry Louis Gates Jr. grew up in West Virginia, and graduated from Yale as a scholar of the house in history. The first African American to be awarded a Paul Mellon Fellowship, Gates studied for a PhD in English literature at Clare College Cambridge.

He taught at Yale, Cornell, and Duke before moving to Harvard in 1991, where he is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, Harvard University.

He is an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic, and institution builder. He has also produced and hosted more than 20 documentary films and published more than 20 books with a focus on African American and African culture.  He is an honorary fellow at Clare College, Cambridge.

Professor Wole Soyinka

Wole Soyinka was born in Abeokuta, Nigeria to Yoruba parentage, whose culture has influenced his works. After studying in Nigeria and the UK, Soyinka directed two theatre companies in Nigeria after a spell as dramaturge at the Royal Court Theatre, London.

Soyinka is best known as a playwright, but his works also include poetry, novels, and essays. He has worked extensively abroad, primarily in the USA, where he has held professorships at several universities.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, considered a writer 'who, in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones fashions the drama of existence.' He is also an Honorary Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge.

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