A discreet tweet caught our attention at the beginning of October, when the freshers weeks, integration weeks on British campuses (which this year were partly virtual due to the pandemic). We saw there the cliché of a Pan-African flag, red, black, green, the banner of the black liberation movements, floating on the roof of Churchill College. The establishment specified that it wanted “Celebrating black history month in the UK”.
To celebrate Black History Month in the UK, we will be flying the Pan-African Flag during the month of October. End … https://t.co/0Z44RKpLjO
A fabric symbol – but what a symbol! You have to come to Cambridge, in the heart of the English countryside, to see how this high place for the transmission of knowledge still breathes immutable and privilege. Cobbled streets, independent bookstores and these venerable buildings scattered throughout the city center: the crenellated towers of St John’s College, King’s College and its sublime Gothic chapel …
A discreet revolution
Like its rival Oxford, a hundred kilometers further west, Cambridge was the preserve for eight centuries of a white male elite. It was the last of the British universities to grant diplomas to women (in 1948). For a handful of years, however, a discreet revolution has been taking place there.
“When I arrived last year, we must have been three black students and a first-year mestizo in my college,” lists on one hand Ayanfeoluwa Adebayo, a second-year medical student at Robinson College, Cambridge. All students are attached to one of these institutions on campus, which accommodates them, offers them activities and supervisors, for almost personalized study monitoring. A middle-school “Not too diverse”, adds the very young woman, long braids and jogging, met in a cafe full of students opposite King’s College.
Ayanfeoluwa is the only black person there. Joshua Adeyemi, in second year of political science at Saint John College, and Folu Ogunyeye, in third year of social and political science at Fitzwilliam, met a stone’s throw away on Market Street. They too are the only black students in a crowded cafe on this street.
The interbreeding of places is not immediately obvious. The numbers remain modest compared to the total campus population (nearly 12,500 undergraduates – not yet graduated – at Cambridge in 2019, roughly the same number at Oxford). But the evolution is impressive: in three years, the number of black students, until then by far the least represented, has multiplied by more than three in Cambridge. They are 137 at the start of the 2020 school year, i.e. 4.6% of the total new arrivals. Same observation in Oxford: the number ofundergraduates from public school has increased from 56% in 2015 to 69% this year. And in four years, the proportion of BME students (Black and minority ethnic) admitted to campus jumped from 14.5% to 22.1%.
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