The Sewasew Column

I Know What I Know

The gothic enclaves of the Fens have always kept a pyre in good order. On the crowning and the burning of Professor Jason Arday — scholar, father, and the newest heretic of Cambridgeshire.

By Sewasew Teklemariam

The Ethiopian Tribune

There is a particular fog that comes off the fens in the small hours, and the old towns wear it like a confession. Cambridge and Oxford: gothic enclaves where the stone remembers what the prospectus forgets. These are the places that perfected, centuries before anyone thought to invent the byline, the fine civic art of deciding who is pure enough to be permitted to remain among the living.

They have form. At Oxford in 1555 they walked Latimer and Ridley to the stake and lit them in the ditch by Balliol, with Cranmer kept back a few months so he might watch and think it over. Out in the fenland parishes a century on, a young man who had appointed himself Witchfinder General rode from village to village with a ledger and a fee, and the towns paid gladly, because certainty has always been cheaper than mercy and it burns a good deal brighter. The enclaves learned the lesson young, and they have never once unlearned it.

The method was elegant, and it has not dated. You bound the accused and you put her in the water. Float, and she was a witch and must be dealt with. Sink, and she was innocent, and unfortunately drowned. Either way the water had spoken, and the water was never wrong, because the water was the process. So when Liverpool John Moores examined the doctoral thesis of Jason Arday and pronounced its faults honest error, and the newspapers examined the very same thesis and pronounced them plagiarism, the fen felt no contradiction at all. An acquittal, to the practised witchfinder, is merely evidence that the conspiracy reaches further than first supposed.

Which brings us to the question the mourners are too gracious to ask and the prosecutors too delighted to answer. Was it the subject that damned him — or the institution that professed to love him?

The Boy in the Bubble

Take the subject first, because there is a terrible symmetry in it. The man taught the sociology of who gets believed. He stood at UCL in the plague spring of 2020, and at Oxford the autumn after, and set the numbers on the board: three-and-twenty thousand professors in the United Kingdom, and among all of them a tally of Black women you could count on your fingers. Not a drought of talent, he argued, but a machine performing its designed function — whiteness installed as the quiet gatekeeper of what is permitted to count as knowledge; minority scholarship shown the tradesman’s entrance save for the one licensed weekend a year; an apartheid of the mind that lets the citadel congratulate itself upon a Black History Month and bolt the library for the other fifty-one. He named the awarding gap for exactly what it is: young people arriving with the same tariff and the same fire and leaving with the lesser degree, the failure lodged always in the institution and never in the child. He called the whole ordeal of the Black scholar inside the walls a test of fortitude and endurance — a crossfire hurricane — and he asked, in that mild way of his, that the burden of fixing it not be laid, as it forever is, on the shoulders of the women of colour least able to refuse it.

He wrote all of this on the board, year upon year. And then, with a thoroughness no external examiner could ever fault, he supplied the practical to his own theory. He proved his thesis by being set alight inside it. The subject did not damn Jason Arday. The subject was merely the one thing he understood better than the men who lit him — right up to the morning it came for him.

Now the institution. Cambridge did the crowning, and Cambridge does not do things by halves. It made him its youngest Black professor. It gave him a chair, and a fellowship at a college that carries, of all the names in Christendom, the name of Christ himself. The British Academy handed him its flagship lecture. The BBC gave him the Today programme for a morning. ITV sat him on a cultural council. The Shaw Trust ranked him fourth among the disabled and the powerful of the land. The establishment dressed the man, head to foot, in the establishment.

And then the wind turned in the fens, as it does, and the same establishment discovered pressing business elsewhere. The webpages grew fewer. The college that had opened its inquiry closed it in the very hour his fellowship lapsed, jurisdiction and charity expiring together on the same tolling of the same bell. Glasgow announced that it would review the appointment it had once announced with a photograph and a smile. Cambridge, which in June had thundered against the campaign as vile, had by August opened an investigation into how it had ever come to hire him — the institution investigating the institution, which is the oldest method the fen possesses for investigating precisely no one.

Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes

This is the thing they never tell you about being clothed by the powerful: the clothes are lent, not given. They will want them back, and they will want them back at the exact moment the cameras swing round, and they will explain — in the register of the deepest imaginable sympathy — that they are desperately saddened, that their thoughts are with the family, that lessons will in due course be learned. It is the liturgy of the institution that has just this moment finished washing its hands and would now like a clean towel and a moment of silence.

There is no unity in England so complete as the unity of a crowd that has found someone to burn.

I Know What I Know

He gave a lecture, in the last good year, that he had the awful foresight to title I Know What I Know. It was about Paul Simon and Graceland — the record a fading star made in 1986, after Hearts and Bones had flopped and the melodies had thinned, when he flew to Johannesburg and cut an album with township players and with Ladysmith Black Mambazo in open defiance of the cultural boycott of apartheid South Africa. Arday laid out the charge and the defence with a fairness he would not, at the last, be granted himself. Was Simon a coloniser helping himself to other men’s music, or the one man who set Black South African voices on a stage the world could no longer look away from? Had he plundered them, or platformed them? He walked the room through Hugh Masekela, the exiled trumpeter who brokered the thing and lent it the legitimacy to cross the line without being burned for the crossing.

He did not know — how on earth could he? — that he was describing himself. For here too was an outsider admitted, on a powerful house’s own terms, across a line most are never let across. Here too the single question that would settle everything: platformed, or used? Was Cambridge the stage that carried his voice to the world, or the studio that took the part it wanted and left the credit vague and the man expendable? Simon’s musicians came away with a Grammy and an argument that has never once closed. Arday came away with a chair, and then a pyre, and an argument that closed the very instant he could no longer speak inside it. He, of all people, knew what he knew. He had stood and lectured on precisely this. He simply never let himself imagine that he was the support act.

Now to the drummers of his own burning — for that fire wanted a drum too, and this one arrived with a full kit. It opened, as these liturgies now do, upon a Substack — a former Cambridge man, himself shown the fenland door for opinions the stone found unclean, who had set down elsewhere his settled view that under a purer meritocracy the Black faces would simply vanish from the better addresses. He fed the thesis to the software and found it wanting. The broadsheets, never knowingly unquotable, christened the man “the diversity poster boy” and rolled up their sleeves. A reporter sent his questions. The professor, unwisely, reached for the libel firm and then for the Metropolitan Police — who, with the sure judgement for which they are justly loved, spent four months investigating the journalist, before their own Commissioner allowed that they had rather dropped the ball. The Free Speech Union, deeply moved, conceived a sudden and consuming passion for the free speech of every soul in the affair bar the one who could no longer use it.

And here is the wonder of the age, the thing they ought to teach in the seminars: the pyre was raised by both hands of the body politic at once. The race-realist of the right laid the kindling; the man from the left, who watched a lecture and pronounced it three-quarters of an hour of a “conman” saying nothing, struck the match. Left and right, who agree on the colour of nothing, agreed on this. In a divided kingdom there is no fellowship so tender, so bipartisan, so warm, as the fellowship of a crowd that has at last found a body to gather round.

He handed them, it must be said, a little of the tinder himself. He had told tales — of marathons and of millions raised and of a book that may never have gone to the printer — and beneath the lamp they did not all hold their shape. He conceded it, at the last, in his flat and unbearable way: I hold myself accountable, he said; we are talking about academia; I did not murder anybody. He was right. He did not. But the witch, too, was always guilty of some small thing — the soured milk, the dead calf, the look held a beat too long — and the point of a pyre was never the truth of the charge. The point of a pyre is the warmth of the watching.

The point of a pyre was never the truth of the charge. The point of a pyre is the warmth of the watching.

Homeless

There is a song on that same Graceland record, sung in Zulu by the very men Simon stood accused of using; it is called “Homeless.” He had stood and taught it. Now take the drum away for a moment, and be quiet. Here is a man the doctors once ruled would need assisting to the end of his days; who did not speak until he was eleven, and read late, and climbed the whole cliff anyway. Whether every handhold on that climb was precisely as he described it, a coroner and his God may between them settle. What is not in dispute — what is not permitted to be in dispute — is that at the end he was a father, a partner, a brother, an uncle, a son. Those are his family’s words, and on this one matter theirs is the only expertise that counts. A gentle man, they said, who always wanted to see the best in everyone. The campaign, they said, had simply been too much. And then they asked the press, with a dignity the press has not once returned to them, to please, now, at last, leave them alone.

There is a young child in this. Somewhere in Battersea there is a small person who will one day be handed a search engine and a name, and will find their father indexed and cross-examined and ranked and archived — a whole carnival of strangers, preserved in amber, still going round. That is the sentence the fen never writes into any judgement and always, always passes.

I will not tell you what killed him. I have the decency — and, let us be honest, the lawyers — not to. A file has gone to the coroner, as it should, and the coroner will establish what a coroner is able to establish. I will say only this: the rest of us were not blind. We watched the wood go up in a neat stack and the tinder go under it and the crowd assemble and the flame take hold, and we have stood at this exact fire before. Six winters ago it wore a different name, a television presenter, and afterwards everyone wept and agreed that lessons would be learned. The lessons are never learned. The lessons are the kindling, seasoned and stacked and waiting, for the next one.

Under African Skies

So. The subject, or the institution? Set the question down at last and answer it plainly. The subject only ever told him what was coming. It was the institution that lit the match — the gothic enclave that will garland a saint on the Monday and disown him by the Friday; that keeps, behind the chapel with the Nazarene’s own name carved over the door, a pyre in perfect working order and a choir rehearsed and ready to sing above the crackle.

Cambridge Jesus, love me to death. The college of mercy’s founder, and mercy the single text left off the reading list.

The drum has stopped now. Under African skies it always stops in the end. And over the enclaves of the Fens the fog comes down again upon the beautiful old lettered stone, and the stone — which remembers everything and confesses nothing — settles back to wait: patient, and learned, and lit, for the next one brave enough to come knocking at its gate.

— Sewasew Teklemariam