Student Life
‘Cecil Rhodes would probably turn in his grave’: Kumi Naidoo on fossil fuels, Amnesty International, and fighting Apartheid
When former Rhodes scholar Kumi Naidoo reflects on his years fighting the Apartheid regime in South Africa, the first thing that comes to mind is not the peril he faced or the discrimination he suffered, but the friendships he made in the process.
“The relationships you build up in that moment of major repression and trauma… sustain you”, he tells me. “Those of us who struggled gave up so much. But I always say to people: what we gain in terms of friendship, solidarity, a life of purpose, a life of meaning, all of these things are invaluable.” It’s a remarkable thing to say about a period of his life when he was wanted by the government.
Born in Durban in 1965, Naidoo was 15 years old when he first became a threat to the South African state after he began organising boycotts against the Apartheid system. A national student uprising had swept through the townships, driven by something simple and infuriating: the inequality in education. “One of the first slogans I heard as a 15-year-old was: ‘You pay our teachers peanuts, no wonder they give us monkey education.’”
The South African government, controlled by the white supremacist National Party during the Apartheid era, allocated vastly more to the education of white children than Black children. Teachers in the townships were underpaid and under-resourced. When students at his school in Durban stood up to say so, the state’s response was immediate and predictable. “Those of us who led the protests were expelled from school. In some funny way, that turned out to be a good thing because we were mainly being fed rote learning, memorising things. When we got expelled, we had to teach ourselves. Some progressive teachers came and helped us stay on top of our coursework.”
His mother had died by suicide that same year, as recounted in raw detail in his memoir Letters to My Mother: The Making of a Troublemaker. He had become politically aware before she died, he says, but her absence changed everything. Most of his friends who had been involved in the uprising were pulled back by their parents once things calmed down. He wasn’t. “In my case, I didn’t have the same family constraints. My mom was not there anymore to exercise caution. My relationship with my dad became strained after my mom passed. So I was able to do whatever I wanted to do. I didn’t have any restrictions on my time, on my movement, which, of course, all my friends had.”
He is quick to add that both parents had laid the groundwork for Naidoo’s activism, even if neither of them was explicitly political. His father was the informal auditor of half the community organisations in Durban, including Hindu associations, Muslim associations, and Christian churches. The headquarters for the local football and cricket associations was their home. Whenever young Kumi asked why Black children couldn’t use the same beaches or fairground rides as white children, the answer was always the same.
“Our parents would always say: ‘Oh no, no, you mustn’t ask questions like that. If you ask questions like that, you’ll end up in prison with Nelson Mandela.’” He laughs. “But I believe very strongly that my brother and I would not have contributed anything substantial to the liberation struggle were it not for the values our parents taught us.”
His mother, in particular, had given him something that transcended politics. “She said, the only religion you need is to see God in the eyes of every human being that you meet… Look for the weaknesses in yourself and the strengths in others, because maybe you can do something about the weakness in yourself, but you might not be able to do something about others.” He has carried that his entire life: “Now, as a holder of that wisdom, I take it and translate it to: ‘See God in every living thing, whether it be human beings or nature.’”
A few weeks after his mother’s death, a family friend sat him down. “My boy, I don’t know how you ever recover from something like this. But one thing I do know: however bad you’re feeling, however traumatised you’re feeling, there are people in our country, in our continent, and around the world who are in a much worse situation than you are. I would urge you not to feel sorry for yourself. Think about all that you have, and try to live your life with purpose, and work for the dignity of everybody.” The advice was transformative: “That’s basically how I’ve tried to live my life”, Naidoo says simply.
From the age of 15 to 18, while keeping on top of his coursework, Naidoo was on the run. He co-founded Helping Hands Youth Association, his local residents’ association, and then he joined Nelson Mandela’s underground movement. He recalls how all-consuming this work became: “Your life became almost full-time activism. And then you did what little you could to just make sure you passed your exams and got into the next year.”
In December 1986, the army came to his home, looking for Naidoo. He happened to be away in Cape Town at the time – being interviewed, of all things, for a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University. He called home after learning he had made the shortlist. What his family told him stopped him cold. “They said: ‘Don’t come back home. The army was here last night.’” Despite being a wanted man, Naidoo was determined to continue his education. He recalls that there were police on every entrance to campus, so he disguised himself as a businessman and was driven onto campus by a white professor at whose house he had been hiding. “And so, I wrote my four exams at a sort of quote-unquote secret venue on campus.”
The Rhodes scholarship was Naidoo’s ticket out of the peril he now found himself in. At the interview, he was the only Black candidate among twelve finalists. When the only Black woman on the panel asked why so few applied, he had a direct answer: the application process itself was built for privilege. You needed a car. You needed money for petrol. You needed to travel to individual meetings with each of the nine panel members. “If you came from a working-class background, that was not something you could take for granted.”
Naidoo questioned whether it was right to take money from the endowment of Cecil John Rhodes, one of the architects of the very system that had forced him to leave South Africa. “I discussed it with my friends and comrades, and we landed on the point that, if I were to get the scholarship, Cecil John Rhodes would probably turn in his grave. And we were not going to lose any sleep from creating him discomfort.” He encourages Black students from poor backgrounds to apply to this day. “We should feel no embarrassment to access a scholarship that was the result of the exploitation of the people of southern Africa, especially if you’re going to use those skills for advancing the interests of the people, rather than just for the advancement of your self-interest.”
Arriving at Oxford to undertake a PhD in Political Sociology was a complete culture shock. The level of political consciousness was not what Naidoo had hoped it would be: “What I found difficult was the level of privilege at Oxford, and the kinds of assumptions that came with it.” But the hardest thing was the separation from his home. “My body was in Oxford. But my heart and soul were still in South Africa because my friends were being thrown in prison, being murdered. All the time while I was in Oxford.”
There is one story he tells that captures the dissonance perfectly. In South Africa, International Workers’ Day on 1st May is a significant, serious occasion: a day to remember the struggle of the working class. When he arrived at Oxford and heard students talking excitedly about May Day, he thought he had found his people.“I thought: ‘Oh, there’s hope, everybody’s concerned about the workers.’” A grin. “Only to discover that May Day was a unique Oxford festival. A pagan festival.”
Naidoo left Oxford before finishing his PhD in 1990, when the African National Congress (ANC) was unbanned, and negotiations about the end of Apartheid began. “Coming back was very easy. I was desperate to be back home to help. Especially after Mandela was released and all the liberation movements were legalised. There was a big kind of excitement: ‘Hey, let’s go home and contribute.’”
In 1994, when the first universal suffrage elections were held, Naidoo found himself thrust into the role of Director of Training for the Independent Electoral Commission, responsible for preparing thousands of electoral staff nationwide. “I’d never run a massive national election before. Neither had I even voted in an election. And suddenly I end up as director for training.”
The challenges were immense. Ballot papers didn’t reach remote rural areas on time. Results were delayed. There was public contestation about the count. At points, Naidoo was the person on television explaining the delays. But it was also joyous: “It was special being part of a very important historic process. To see the long lines, the patience that people had to go and vote. After almost two decades of struggle, to see democracy finally be born in South Africa, that was quite a special experience.”
He returned to Oxford in 1995 to finish the DPhil he had started in 1987. He is cheerfully unashamed about the timeline: “My biggest academic achievement: I took the longest to ever complete a PhD at Oxford. I started in 1987 and graduated in 2000.” He pauses, laughing. “Most people, if it takes that long, they give up.”
After Apartheid came to an end with the victory of the ANC in the 1994 elections, Naidoo would eventually find himself engaged in a new struggle: climate justice. He had spent a decade leading CIVICUS, a global alliance of civil society organisations, when Greenpeace came calling. His first instinct was to redirect them. “I basically said to them: ‘Hey, I know some good environmentalists.’”
When they persisted and asked him to meet, he agreed reluctantly. Then his daughter found out. “She said: ‘Dad, I won’t talk to you if you don’t seriously consider this Greenpeace position. Because Greenpeace is fighting for my future, and you need to do much more on climate change.’” He smiles. “I always attribute my embracing of environmental justice to the encouragement I got from my daughter.”
He brought to Greenpeace a critique that has come to define the rest of his career: “One of the biggest mistakes we made was that Western environmentalism framed climate change as an environmental issue, whereas climate change is a result of our economic system, our energy system, our food system, our transport system. To treat any of these issues in three different silos is exactly wrong.
“If you are a person of colour in the global North, most likely you’re living near a polluting facility. If you are white, you’re probably not facing the same challenges to air quality. Not only does linking these issues not dilute the environmental message, it actually makes climate justice much more real, pertinent, and brings it home to ordinary people. If you talk about climate only in degrees and parts per million, and you don’t connect it to air quality, to jobs, to local community, you will never move the large numbers of people you need to move.”
In June 2011, he spent four days in a Greenlandic prison after occupying a Gazprom oil platform in the Arctic. The drilling resumed soon after. He does not pretend otherwise. “Social change rarely happens in a straight line. Most actions do not achieve their immediate objective overnight. The anti-Apartheid struggle certainly did not.” What matters, he says, is cumulative pressure. “Sometimes the impact of an action is not measured in days or weeks but in whether it helps move society closer to a tipping point for change.”
The road has been bumpy. In 2015, he resigned from Greenpeace, a year after it emerged that a staffer had lost £3 million in donor funds on the foreign exchange market. His tenure as Secretary-General of Amnesty International was short-lived: he resigned, citing ill-health in 2019, not long after allegations of a toxic workplace culture, highlighted by a researcher’s suicide, led staff to petition for his removal. He speaks about both with the same equanimity he brings to everything. “When I was headhunted for both the Amnesty International and Greenpeace leadership roles, one of the key reasons I was approached was the recognition that both institutions were structurally racist and did not reflect the realities of the world as it actually is. A key part of my mandate was therefore to help rebalance power within these organisations.”
Transformation, he notes, creates losers as well as winners. “When institutions begin to shift power from Global North to Global South, some people inevitably lose privileged positions, influence, and status.” He does not say this unkindly. “But it becomes deeply problematic when organisations like Greenpeace and Amnesty call on the world to act urgently and justly, while failing to look anything like the 88% of the world’s population that lives in the Global South.”
So, is there a difference between being a great activist and being a great organisational leader? “They are definitely not the same thing. Activism often rewards disruption, urgency, moral clarity, challenging institutions from the outside. Organisational leadership requires patience, coalition-building, administration, compromise, sustaining complex systems over time. Some people are exceptional activists but not effective institutional leaders. Others are strong managers but struggle to inspire movements. I tried throughout my life to bridge those worlds, sometimes successfully and sometimes imperfectly. Ultimately, others will judge how well I did.”
He has also engaged with the World Economic Forum in Davos while publicly criticising it, a contradiction some find hard to swallow. He doesn’t. “I believe we must be able to engage critically without becoming captured. My criticism of Davos has always been that too many powerful actors speak about justice and sustainability while continuing to benefit from systems that produce inequality and ecological destruction. But refusing to enter those spaces at all can also become a form of self-isolation. If we only speak to people who already agree with us, we limit our ability to influence outcomes.”
His current focus is the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, which he now leads as President of the initiative. The logic, he says, is simple: “Imagine one day you’re rushing off to school, and when you come back, you notice there’s water seeping out of the bathroom. You open the door and realise you left the tap on. What do you do first? Do you turn off the tap, or do you start mopping the floor?” He lets that sit. “For 30 years, we’ve been mopping the floor. 86% of what drives climate change is our dependency on oil, coal, and gas. Unless we address the root cause, which is fossil fuels, we’re not actually addressing the climate struggle at all.”
The model is the 1997 landmine ban treaty: a coalition of ambitious countries negotiates outside the UN system, brings it to the General Assembly, and forces a vote. “By the time that happens, there will be very few countries putting up their hands saying: ‘Oh yes, we want fossil fuels, just as nobody put up their hands saying we want landmines.’”
He is not naive about the opposition. “The lobbying capability of the fossil fuel industry is not to be underestimated at all. They’ve got marketing and communications resources on a scale that you can only dream about.” But the public understanding has shifted, and that, he believes, is harder to reverse than a lobbying victory. “I don’t think it’s going to be as easy for them as they might be thinking because more and more people understand that the root cause of climate change is our dependence on oil and gas.”
Naidoo is 61 now. A member of the University of Oxford’s Equality and Diversity Unit and an honorary fellow of Magdalen College, he remains very much a part of the city that provided him sanctuary from the repression of Apartheid. The boy who dressed as a businessman to sit his university exams while the police searched for him has lived, by any measure, several full lives. The professor who drove him through those campus gates is part of a long chain of people who took a risk for him, and for whom he has, in turn, taken risks. “It’s much better to try and fail”, he says, repeating one of his mother’s wisdoms, “than to fail to try”.
Dr Michael Foran, Associate Professor of Law and Fellow of Keble College, has cancelled the remaining lectures in a series on sex, gender identity, and the law, following protests at two of the events.
The lecture series, hosted by Keble College, examined themes from Foran’s recent book Sex, Gender Identity and the Law. Topics included the legal treatment of sex, single-sex spaces, and gender-identity beliefs, and sexual consent.
Foran is an expert in equality and anti-discrimination law, whose work has been cited by the UK Supreme Court. His lecture series was delivered alongside the publication of his book, which traces the history of how sex has changed within UK law, and its implications for ongoing controversies over single-sex spaces, freedom of expression, and sexual intimacy. Protesters said his positions on sex and gender identity, and his associations with certain campaign groups, motivated their demonstrations. They told Cherwell: “We have a moral responsibility to challenge transphobic rhetoric, even when it’s dressed up in academia.”
The protesters also argued that Foran’s associations with organisations such as Sex Matters and the Women’s Rights Network, which they described as working to “erode the rights of trans people”, made his platforming by the University a harmful rather than neutral act. They further argued that his work “weaponises the language of feminism to pit women’s rights against trans rights”.
Footage of the protests, which has circulated widely on social media, appears to show protesters standing to read statements before leaving the events. A statement shared by individuals involved in the protests, including the Oxford LGBTQ+ Society’s President, who appeared in footage circulated online, disputed characterisations of their actions as harassment or bullying. They told Cherwell they had “read out short statements, and left peacefully”, and that Foran had been able to continue delivering his lectures after they left. The statement said the decision to cancel the remaining events “was entirely his own” and not something the protesters had called for.
The protestors also told Cherwell that engaging with Foran through the lectures’ question-and-answer sessions would have required them to challenge his views within a format that he controlled. They added that the protest allowed them to “create our own space for expression”, and rejected suggestions that their actions were “anti-intellectual”.
In a statement posted on social media following the cancellations, Foran described the decision to cancel his remaining lectures as “deeply lamentable” and said that disagreement with a speaker’s views should be expressed through debate rather than disruption.
The protests attracted significant attention online, including from former Home Secretary Suella Braverman, who criticised them on social media, describing them as an attack on free speech. Protesters have argued that their actions constituted a peaceful and lawful form of political expression, and rejected media portrayals of their actions as intimidating or harassing.
The University of Oxford told Cherwell: “Freedom of speech and academic freedom are fundamental to the University of Oxford. Members of our academic community must be able to teach, research, speak and debate within the law, including on issues that are controversial or strongly contested. Equally, we support the right to lawful protest and civil disagreement.”
The University added that despite interruptions at the start, the first two talks proceeded and continued uninterrupted, and said it was “concerned that the series will not now be completed as planned”. It confirmed it would work with Foran to explore how the remaining events might take place.
A year is a long time: enough to call a place home, enough to strip away the bright facade of newness. I’ve spent my year abroad at this university, unstuck in time. My friends at home have lived a thousand different lives in the interim, and I suppose so have I. But this place is different. It’s somewhere that’s nearly impossible to explain. My friends ask me about how it compares to Brown University, and I find myself at a loss. The differences are manifold; they’re cosmically different, worlds apart. How can I express how I feel about Oxford? How can I capture this rapturous feeling? I cannot hope to explain my world here. And yet, I must try. I love this place, I hate this place, I can’t bear to leave it behind. I don’t think it will ever truly leave me.
I write to tell you all what this place means to me. To tell you what it has been to take a year abroad.
Michaelmas
Oxford still seemed romantic, a sort of richly brocaded city of dreaming; it was all twisting spires and ancient promises. The city was new, freshly minted in my mind. Things felt heavier: the air, the weight of age, the frantic, feverish rhythm of life. That was particularly significant, the speed at which everything seemed to go. Two months is not a long time. The rate of coursework, essays, and even social activities seemed breakneck. I found myself settling into my modules, grinding out two essays every single week. I would go to the Radcliffe Camera and bask under the elegant arches and soft incandescent light. Work felt special when it was beneath the watchful eye of some marble statue. I rowed in the mornings, and swam on Saturdays. Days were spent dutifully working, nights were consumed by revelry.
There was something on every single evening. Whether it was formals (such an alien concept, even to students in the UK, I’m sure), college BOPs, club nights, socials, or debate nights, I was meeting new people at a rate which rivalled my own first year of university. Formal dinners were particularly dazzling – dressing up for a three-course meal in a vaulted hall evoked some sort of Public school fantasy – and it’s no surprise I went to as many as I could afford. I involved myself in societies which seemed novel and interesting. I made friends in student politics, and watched with mild amusement as intrigues unfolded on a scale unlike any I’d seen before. It felt very…Oxford. It was somewhat alluring, the draw of the glitz and glamour of an entirely different social world.
But my disillusionment with student politics came early into the term. One night, sequestered in a college common room, beneath dim lights, I found myself at a hushed afters. The group was discussing one of my friends, saying terrible things. I knew then what I know now: I wanted no part of that world. I resolved to extricate myself.
Like any new thing, Michaelmas was bright, exciting, and romantic. Underneath the shine, I found that some truths were better left buried. The journey out of darkness was not easy or linear, but it was worth it.
Hilary
Hilary began as it ended, with a sort of incorrigible grey. There was a lightness to it, at some point in the middle, when things fell into place. When the rhythms of life here began to feel as normal as breathing. I wrote so much that term: articles for a student paper, modules on Mesopotamia and Ethnobotany, and pages and pages in my journal. I also took up ice skating. There was something freeing about gliding across that glittering rink. It smiled at me, kissed my cheeks with cool breath, and pushed my feet across frozen ground. I found peace in my solo skates, joy in skating with others. Collapsing into bed, face flushed from the cold, I could not have been happier.
By this point, the glamour of student politics had thoroughly worn off. It seemed more like a tired old thing, full of fatigued people. Yet still, friends found themselves deeper entrenched in the machinery of it. I pulled further and further away as they ran elections and relayed intrigues.
Working on the student paper was my saving grace, with the Schwarzman becoming an unlikely refuge. We spent long hours below that sun-soaked ceiling, passing the day in leisurely conversation. We discussed the paper, pitched articles, and wrote silly headlines that could never be published. Little work was done, even when dusk came and went. The watchful oculus considered us carefully, as we raced about on rolling chairs under the moonlight. We would stay into the early morning hours, dancing, singing, running around that hollowed-out space. The darkness was warm.
Nights at the Schwarzman melted into afters at one room or another. Twilight spent in fervent conversation, marked by tea or cheese and crackers. I felt so full in these liminal moments. Pink parties, game cafes, and homemade DnD campaigns made my time at college all the brighter. Although the end of Hilary was marked by a particularly nasty bout of pneumonia, I felt satisfied with all I’d done in my grey little term.
Sometimes, in that mid-year lull, the only thing to do is to keep pressing forward. There is a light at the end of the tunnel. The articles and essays I wrote that term are still some of my favourites.
Trinity
May night was long and dark, a treacherous road twisting round the riverbend. We walked in cold twilight. Moonbeams glanced across my cheek – a quiet beacon in the near black. The neon glow of varsity faded into dawn, slowly. When the sun finally turned Magdalen Tower blushing red, the choir heralded the start of spring. May morning shone just a bit too brightly, full of clamorous noise and clatter. Dancing and merry bells followed me all the way into my belated slumber.
Oxford was beginning to shimmer beneath the brilliant sunshine. It made everything feel just a bit more hopeful. I was determined to spend the term trying an entirely new set of activities. I shed the politics which made Hilary drag endlessly, and leaned into my renewed joy for writing. I joined two magazines and a different student paper. These turned out to be such sources of light: full of incredible, creative people, and even more incredible work. Writing articles, performing pieces, editing work, it was all so fulfilling. I looked forward every week to our lay-ins, or planning meetings for events.
Trinity was a time of great celebration. I attended countless birthdays, including my own. My friends made me such thoughtful cakes; I was laughing long into the night. It was so nice to be with the people who made Oxford special. I turned 21 under the multicoloured lights at the Brasenose Ball. It felt magical, to be able to mark the occasion in such a fairytale manner. I will always remember the purple glow and the soft music in the background as I checked my watch, and hugged my friend tight when the hour hand slid to midnight.
Ultimately, it was the small moments that made Trinity particularly special: whether it was simply studying with finalists, or watching Eurovision for the first time on my friend’s bed (we ate too many of her snacks and took our bets entirely too seriously).
I must have done absolutely no revision the second the sun came out. Maybe it was the warmth of the afternoon light on my face at Port Meadow, or the cool depths of Hinksey Lake, but those days passed in such a calm haze. The picture of idyllic summertime.
Sometimes, letting go is just a chance for a new beginning.
__
Oxford has been so many things. I’ve sought out every hidden place and tried every new activity that I could reasonably fit around my coursework. I’ve met so many important people who have impacted my life in countless ways. It took time to find my place here. There was a significant period of trial and error, but I’ve somehow made it to where I am happiest. I do not regret the experiences I tried which were not quite right for me. I learned from them, they were meaningful, and made for fantastic stories.
When I return to Brown in the autumn, I will carry all of these experiences with me. I will hold them close to my heart, and I will try, and fail, and try again to explain how much they mean to me. If you are embarking on a year abroad, whether for your third year of Modern Languages, or to Oxford just like me, prepare to try everything. Prepare to change, to experience as many new things as you possibly can. You will return different, but you will be better for it.
A year is a long time to be away from home.
It’s impossible to not be romantic about football, and by that I mean Romantic with a capital R. Turns out the literary canon of the Romantics and the sporting world share an unexpected similarity: they’re both home to a unanimously agreed-upon Big Six.
In this day and age being able to discuss both versions with an elementary level of proficiency grants you similar amounts of cultural capital (albeit in very different circles). Think football is the domain of the intellectually challenged? Could you recite the entire Premier League standings but not a single poem? Doesn’t matter – these parallels go either way, and hopefully at least one side of the equation will be recognisable.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Manchester City
Coleridge’s most famous work – ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ – works best when read as a summary of City’s journey:
The titular mariner’s ship (Manchester City) gets stuck in the icy waters of the Antarctic (relegated in 2001). An albatross (the United Arab Emirates) appears and leads the ship out of the ice jam (provides an injection of money), into clearer waters and better winds (breaking the British transfer record and spending over £100 million pounds in a summer). Despite things going splendidly as the albatross is fed and loved by the crew (that Aguero goal), the mariner shoots the bird (for cohesion’s sake, read “With my cross-bow / I shot the Albatross” as “With my Abu Dhabi money / I breached the FFP rules” instead).
To no one’s surprise, this brings down the wrath of spirits and supernatural forces, and the mariner is forced by his crew to wear the albatross’s dead body around his neck as a sign of the burden he must bear. The rest of his crew perish one by one, but the mariner is consigned to eternal life: though the albatross eventually falls from his neck, he’s still doomed to wander the earth, telling his story to those he meets.
Like the mariner, a shadow the size of 115 charges hangs over City’s unprecedented success – the continental treble and four consecutive Premier League titles. An elephant in the room might as well be an albatross around the neck. One must imagine Pep Guardiola a mariner aboard the golden ship of his club’s crest.
Percy Shelley – Manchester United
This is the easiest comparison of all to make. Incredibly divisive among their peers, but indisputably influential in determining the landscape of the era: the man or the football club? Both have famously swung between extremes of ecstasy or despair and experienced prolonged periods of personal crisis: put being expelled from Oxford and eloping with 16-year-old Mary Shelley as a married man up there with paying Ruben Amorim 10 million Great British pounds to leave.
But the thing that seals the deal is that they both share the same defining narrative: a tale of the ruins of a man who thought himself and his legacy eternal. It’s so fitting you could be forgiven for thinking Shelley predicted the trajectory of Manchester United with ‘Ozymandias’, written a solid 60 years before the club was even founded. I met a traveller from an antique land (apparently Manchester received city-status in March 1853, which places it quite firmly in the realm of antiquity) who told me about a statue with frown, and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command (Ferguson was already rather old when they immortalised him in bronze, and his visage has a real degree of condescension to it.)
My name is Sir Alex Ferguson, manager of managers. Look upon what my prodigal players have gone on to be, ye mighty, and despair. The Theatre of Dreams isn’t exactly a “colossal wreck” yet, but what with the well-known reports of rat infestations and waterfalls pouring down through the roof, they don’t seem to be too far off.
Lord Byron – Arsenal
Cosmopolitan, rebellious, countercultural: Byron gained this reputation from scandals that ranged from bisexuality to a rumoured incestuous affair with his half-sister, Arsenal from being the first English top-flight team to field an all-foreign starting XI and becoming synonymous with a space for black cultural expression.
It’s probably bold to compare a nobleman playboy who drank wine out of his ancestor’s skull to a white-haired bespectacled Frenchman who dressed like a stern professor, but Byron influenced European Romanticism in much the same way Wenger revolutionised the landscape of English football. Their lasting legacy has come to define them to the layman: Byron with the literary archetype of the Byronic hero – brooding, torn, romantic – and Arsenal with their Invincibles.
Byron was a connoisseur of leaving and the difficulty and complexity of goodbyes recur again and again in his poetry; of Don Juan, leaving Spain, he wrote: “First partings form a lesson hard to learn […] there is a shock that sets one’s heart ajar”. What he would’ve written about Wenger’s departure.
John Keats – Tottenham Hotspur
A questionable inclusion in the Big Six for some: during his lifetime Keats wouldn’t have been placed in the company of the others mentioned above. He had a relationship of mutual distaste with Byron in particular, who thought Keats an annoyance beneath his social and literary standing; in turn, Keats simultaneously envied and disliked Byron’s fame and aristocracy, and thought his literary prowess overrated (convinced yet?) Both have had a few distinctly memorable hits: Kane, Son, Ode on a Grecian Urn.
Most fittingly, Keats coined the concept of “negative capability” – the ability to “be in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any reaching after fact and reason”. Such a phrase has never captured Spurs better. While Keats originally envisioned it as a poet’s ability to sink into the objects or characters he was writing about without fitting them into rigid structures of logic, the absolute incomprehensibility of being Spursy is perhaps the prime example of modern negative capability.
To be Spurs is to be negatively capable, to be negatively capable Spurs – that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
William Wordsworth – Chelsea
A clarity to the earlier years that has become compromised in later life. Wordsworth had a “Great Decade” of life in which he produced some era-defining works, chief among them the poem ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ (probably the bane of most GCSE students’ existence) and The Prelude, his great autobiographical work. There was something undeniably beautiful about Chelsea’s older days – their own Great Decade, if you will: Lampard, Terry, Mourinho’s 04-05 side whose record of 15 goals conceded in a season still stands unmatched.
Every rise also has to have a fall. Later in his life Wordsworth’s decline is mostly attributed to his excessive self-editing; he transformed his lines, once famed for their simplicity, into something more affected, losing the core of his work. Todd Boehly’s Chelsea have spent ludicrous sums of money on squad-building to no avail and fired ten managers in the last ten years (interims generously excluded). Hopefully they can find a force to follow that might provide the same stability Christianity brought Wordsworth in his middle age.
William Blake – Liverpool
Best known for ‘Tyger, Tyger’, Blake’s work carries a distinct feeling of mystical intensity, of seeing remarkable things in very ordinary places. A creative visionary who crafted a mythology of his own in his prophetic books, you can’t help but think he would have loved Anfield, the domain of a fervent working-class that has become imbued with a fervent mysticism all its own. (Blake should have spoken to Bill Shankly, who once reflected: “It’s a religion to them. The thousands who come here come to worship… it’s a sort of shrine.”)
That aside, the experience of truly understanding Blake and of being a player under Jurgen Klopp’s gegenpressing system are about as similar as it gets: notoriously difficult to grapple with and incredibly tiring.
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