Africa as the First Site of Loss : Reparations historical responsibility and the danger of the African sellers narrative

 Dr Abigal Muchecheti

Africa Beyond the Textbook

Abstract

This essay examines the political and historical dangers of invoking ‘African sellers’ as a counterargument to Caribbean claims for reparations from Britain and other European powers. It argues that particular African rulers, merchants and intermediaries must be studied without converting a continent into a collective perpetrator. The transatlantic trade began its destruction within Africa through kidnapping, warfare, forced movement, confinement, depopulation and the extraction of skilled people. European demand, state protection, shipping, credit and plantation economies enlarged these processes into an oceanic system whose institutional gains accumulated principally outside Africa. Reparatory justice must therefore distinguish specific participation from collective liability, recognise Africa as the first site of injury, and resist political narratives that divide Africans from their descendants across the diaspora.

Keywords  Atlantic slavery; reparations; Africa; Jamaica; African diaspora; kidnapping; depopulation; historical responsibility

Introduction

During Jamaica’s renewed pursuit of reparatory justice from Britain, MP Everald Warmington argued that Black Africans who sold captives had more to answer for than the white people who bought them. He went further: “The white man didn’t go to Africa and pick up enslaved people,” he said. “They didn’t go there and catch enslaved people.” Warmington also declared, “My root is here in Jamaica and not in Africa.” These are not simply requests to examine African participation. They are claims about who carried out the violence, where responsibility lies and whether Jamaica’s history can be separated from Africa’s. They require an answer grounded in the history before the coastal sale.

Warmington’s intervention matters because of its timing and political effect. Jamaica’s petition concerns Britain’s responsibility for the forced transportation and enslavement of Africans in Jamaica and the continuing consequences of that system. Introducing an undefined African liability at this point enables the former imperial state to redirect scrutiny. The familiar sentence ‘Africans sold Africans’ then functions as a verdict rather than the beginning of inquiry. It asks who completed a transaction at the coast but not who created the expanding demand, supplied the ships, financed the voyages, intensified warfare, entered the interior, confined captives, legislated hereditary slavery and accumulated the resulting wealth.

The argument developed here is not that every African participant was innocent. It is that historical agency must be specified rather than racialised. If reparations are concerned with injury, accumulated benefit and institutional continuity, Africa belongs at the table primarily as the first site of loss and as a claimant alongside Caribbean and other diasporic societies—not as an undifferentiated debtor.

The modern word ‘African’ suggests a continental political identity that did not govern the actions of the numerous kingdoms, towns, lineages and trading communities involved over four centuries. A person captured in war, kidnapped while travelling, pawned temporarily, convicted of an offence, seized in a raid or betrayed during a political dispute did not enter one uniform institution. Nor can we assume that everyone involved in local forms of captivity understood the fate awaiting those carried across the Atlantic. Thomas (1997) describes captives’ distress when ships sailed away from the coast. That account does not prove what every seller knew, but it does challenge the assumption that people on all sides of a coastal transaction understood the oceanic, permanent and hereditary system in the same way.

African societies had existing systems of servitude, dependency, pawning and slavery. Recognising this is necessary. It does not demonstrate that those systems already contained the scale, permanence or commercial machinery of Atlantic plantation slavery. European and American demand transformed what defeat, debt and captivity could mean by creating an external market capable of removing people permanently across an ocean. The arrival and repeated return of ships enlarged the incentive to produce captives, while firearms and imported goods could alter regional balances of power (Lovejoy 2012; Thornton 1998).

The phrase also obscures intermediaries whose identity crossed the supposedly clear line between Africa and Europe. In West Central Africa, Luso-African and Afro-Portuguese commercial elites could be Christian, Portuguese-speaking and integrated into Brazilian and Portuguese networks Some occupied protected social positions distinguished them from populations vulnerable to capture. Describing them only as Africans erases the Atlantic affiliations through which they exercised power. Candido’s work on Benguela further demonstrates that even free Africans, traders and locally prominent people could be kidnapped and illegally exported, while vassal chiefs and their communities remained vulnerable to raids (Candido 2013; 2020).

The coastal sale is often treated as the first historical event. In reality it was frequently preceded by violence. People were kidnapped from roads, fields and homes; seized during warfare; captured while fleeing; marched towards the coast; confined in barracoons, forts, cellars and underground holding places; and guarded because merchants knew that they would escape if given the opportunity. Some European traders waited offshore or near islands for opportunities to seize people directly. Others joined military attacks, financed local violence, employed agents or relied upon mixed Atlantic networks. Hugh Thomas catalogues kidnapping, warfare, judicial condemnation, debt and raiding among the routes into Atlantic enslavement (Thomas 1997). Warmington’s assertion that white men did not go into Africa to catch people is therefore too absolute. European involvement took several forms across different places and centuries: direct seizure in some instances, military intervention, financing, agents, coastal confinement, shipping and the creation of a sustained market for captives. The fact that many captives were seized by African actors does not erase other forms of European participation or make the violence before embarkation an exclusively African affair.

The victims were not only socially marginal people. Accounts include chiefs, royal relatives and people of high political status who became captives after defeat, betrayal or accusation. Such cases destabilise the idea that chiefs simply sold their own populations from positions of permanent security. A ruler could cooperate in one period, resist in another, or become vulnerable when alliances shifted. The history of the Kakondas in Benguela, as it appears in the material under discussion, belongs to this unstable field of accommodation, rebellion and survival rather than to a simple marketplace of willing sellers.

African resistance occurred throughout the centuries of the trade even when it was not continentally coordinated. King Afonso I of Kongo protested in 1526 that kidnapping and unauthorised removal were depopulating his kingdom. Other rulers restricted access, attempted to protect their subjects, accepted vassalage under pressure, fought invading forces or changed strategies after witnessing the destruction of neighbouring communities. Captives resisted during marches, in barracoons, aboard ships and after arrival. The absence of a unified African state capable of coordinating continental defence cannot be rewritten as collective African consent.

A reparations history beginning only with those who reached Jamaica omits the parents whose children disappeared, the communities whose members died resisting capture and those who perished before they entered a shipping register. These losses are not secondary. They are the first stage of the same historical crime.

European demand and the construction of machinery

European participation was not confined to purchasing people whom Africans independently chose to sell. Monarchies issued licences, chartered companies, collected duties and defended commerce. Merchants assembled capital through partnerships. Insurers protected voyages. Manufacturers produced textiles, metal goods, alcohol and weapons for African exchange. Shipbuilders adapted vessels, while merchants calculated tonnage, hold depth, space between decks, speed and the commercial life of a ship.

The improvement of slave ships is especially revealing. Copper sheathing protected hulls from shipworm and increased speed. Faster, better-protected vessels reduced commercial risk and allowed capital to return sooner. This was not the behaviour of reluctant customers passively responding to an African supply. It was the development of an industry. By the 1790s, the scale of British shipping assigned to the Guinea trade and the hundreds of voyages departing Liverpool, London and Bristol demonstrated organised demand rather than accidental involvement (Thomas 1997).

European observers also classified African populations according to supposed regional characteristics and labouring abilities. Their descriptions were shaped by racial ideology and commercial stereotype, not neutral ethnography. Nevertheless, they disclose intention. Buyers sought people whom they believed to be skilled farmers, metalworkers, miners, healers, boatmen or otherwise valuable workers. The trade therefore removed not only population in the abstract but knowledge embodied in particular people. Individuals whose expertise might have supported their own societies were redirected into plantation, mining, domestic and artisanal labour elsewhere.

Some merchants admitted moral discomfort while continuing to trade. Jean Barbot acknowledged the unpleasantness of enslavement in the Americas but rationalised it by degrading free life in Africa. Stanislas Foäche wrote that slave sales caused him cruel uneasiness and made him blush, yet remained in the business for years. Henry Laurens later condemned reprehensible conduct and declared hatred of slavery after accumulating a fortune. These examples do not demonstrate ignorance. They show recognition followed by justification, delay or profitable continuation.

Africa as the first site of loss

If reparations are organised around loss, Africa cannot appear principally as a debtor. It was the first site of injury. Before plantation labour was extracted in Jamaica, Brazil, Cuba, the United States and elsewhere, people had already been removed from African families, economies and political societies. Some died during capture, resistance, forced marches, confinement or coastal transfer. Others were displaced while fleeing raids. Shipping databases cannot count people who never reached an embarkation port.

The losses were demographic, economic, political and epistemic. African communities lost children and future generations; farmers, fishers and craftspeople; healers, metallurgists and traders; military defenders and political leaders; and the knowledge those people carried. In heavily affected regions, repeated removal could weaken production, reduced security, altered settlement and migration patterns, and intensified political fragmentation. The consequences did not end when a ship sailed. Atlantic extraction was later compounded by colonial conquest, resource removal and the seizure of cultural objects.

To state that particular African elites profited is not to establish that Africa benefited. A ruling group can gain wealth while the wider society is devastated. Indeed, the gains themselves were profoundly unequal. European merchants converted captive labour into repeated plantation production and then into ships, banks, insurance, property, universities, churches, schools, art collections and intergenerational family fortunes. African participants often received imported goods whose supply and quality Europeans controlled, including textiles, alcohol, metal goods and firearms. Some goods were inferior, diluted, second-hand or manufactured specifically for that market. Weapons could deepen the very insecurity that generated further captives.

Hugh Thomas reports exceptional wealth attributed to King Tebegsu of Dahomey. Such cases require scrutiny, including scrutiny of the evidentiary basis for the sums reported. They cannot establish continent-wide enrichment. The relevant comparison is not whether any African profited, but where the durable financial and institutional accumulation occurred. The enduring banks, merchant houses, estates, civic buildings, universities and political dynasties documented in Europe and the Americas have no continent-wide African equivalent generated by the trade.

A serious reparations framework can investigate African perpetrators without imposing collective African guilt. It can identify a specific ruler, merchant, dynasty or institution; establish the conduct involved; trace the benefit; distinguish voluntary profit from coercion; and ask whether a surviving institution inherited the gain. That is historical accountability.

‘African sellers,’ by contrast, is a racial and continental accusation. Modern African borders frequently contain descendants of raided communities alongside descendants of rulers and intermediaries. A present-day citizen may descend from people captured, killed or displaced rather than from anyone who profited. Some people will descend from several positions at once. Modern states created through colonial partition cannot automatically be treated as the legal successors of every earlier kingdom located within their boundaries.

Institutional continuity matters. Jamaica’s petition identifies Britain because the British Crown, Parliament, chartered companies, colonial administrations and legal system authorised and protected the enslavement practised in Jamaica. British financial, religious and educational institutions also retained identifiable benefits. CARICOM’s reparatory framework directs claims towards governments and institutions enriched by crimes against humanity and proposes remedies extending beyond individual cash payments, including formal apology, cultural institutions, African knowledge programmes, public-health repair, technology transfer and debt cancellation (CARICOM Reparations Commission n.d.).

The African Union likewise frames reparations as justice for Africans and people of African descent. Its recent agenda recognises enslavement, colonialism and apartheid as connected sources of continuing harm and treats continental and diasporic claims as mutually reinforcing rather than adversarial (African Union 2025; African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights 2026). This is a more coherent political direction than placing Africa and the Caribbean on opposite sides of an imagined reparations invoice.

The political danger of diasporic division

The claim that ‘Africans sold us’ has produced real anger among some Caribbean descendants. That anger cannot simply be mocked; it reflects an inherited trauma and a historical education that often ended at the moment of sale. Yet the truncated narrative encourages Caribbean people to imagine Africa principally as the betrayer and Africans to respond defensively by minimising Caribbean suffering. The descendants of people harmed at different locations in the same system are then invited to blame one another. Warmington is entitled to say that Jamaica is his home and the centre of his political identity. But “my root is here in Jamaica and not in Africa” cannot settle the historical question. For descendants of Africans forced across the Atlantic, Jamaican belonging and African ancestry are not mutually exclusive. Enslavement violently interrupted the ability of many families to name particular African ancestors or places of origin; it did not make their lives begin at the point of arrival in Jamaica. That rupture is part of the injury for which reparatory justice is sought.

Warmington’s intervention is dangerous not because difficult questions should be prohibited, but because an incomplete question can perform political work. In the context of Jamaica’s claim against Britain, the demand to include African sellers supplies European governments with a diversion: responsibility can be redirected to an undefined continent, and Black populations can be told to settle the issue among themselves.

The African diaspora is not confined to Jamaica. Descendants of enslaved Africans live across Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, the United States, Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Honduras, Argentina and numerous other societies. Histories of slavery and forced movement also extend through Cape Verde, São Tomé, Mauritius, Seychelles and the wider Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. Reparatory justice requires collaboration among African states, Caribbean societies, African Americans, Black Latin Americans and other African-descended communities. No single national group can represent the totality of the loss.

The same need for historical breadth applies to Black British history. Windrush is a crucial twentieth-century chapter, but it is not the beginning of Black presence in Britain. Black people lived in London, Bristol, Liverpool and other cities centuries earlier—some free, some enslaved, some in conditions between liberty and bondage, and some sent for education by African merchant families. Making Windrush synonymous with all Black British history erases those earlier populations and the direct African dimensions of Britain’s Atlantic world.

Sources archives and public responsibility

The controversy also demonstrates why public claims about slavery should be sourced. Political status, emotional certainty and social-media reach do not substitute for historical reading. The archive must itself be approached critically because many surviving records were created by merchants, officials and enslavers, but unreferenced assertion is even more vulnerable to inherited myths and rage-driven simplification.

Public commentators should state the basis of their claims: which archive, voyage register, court record, company account, letter or historical study supports the argument? They should distinguish evidence from inference and identify disagreement among historians. This is especially important in an environment where short videos and confrontational television reward moral certainty more readily than explanation.

The demand for sources is not a demand for emotionless history. Rage, grief and moral revulsion are reasonable responses to slavery. But deduction must follow evidence. Without that discipline, a slogan inherited from colonial education can be repeated as though it were historical discovery.

Conclusion

African participation in the Atlantic slave trade must be studied. Some rulers and merchants pursued profit, and their actions should be named. But the category ‘African sellers’ cannot bear the historical or legal weight placed upon it. It obscures kidnapping, direct European capture, warfare, political coercion, mixed Atlantic elites, resistance and the vulnerability of African rulers and communities. It also ignores the unequal accumulation produced by the trade: durable European and American institutions on one side, and profound African demographic, political and epistemic loss on the other.

If chronology and foundational injury guide reparatory analysis, Africa must come first—not as the sole victim and not in competition with Jamaica or the wider diaspora, but as the first site from which people, capacity and knowledge were extracted. The Caribbean and the Americas then became further sites of forced labour, hereditary bondage and colonial underdevelopment. These claims form a chain; they do not cancel one another.

Warmington is entitled to ask why particular African participants receive insufficient scrutiny. He is not entitled to substitute an undefined racial continent for identifiable historical actors. Before asking why African sellers are absent from the reparations claim, he must ask where African victims have gone in his own argument: the kidnapped children, the grieving parents, the captured chiefs, the displaced communities, those who died before embarkation and those whose knowledge was permanently removed.

Reparations should unite the descendants and societies harmed across Africa and its diaspora. A historically serious movement will name every perpetrator it can identify, trace institutional benefit wherever it survives and recognise injury at every stage. It will not allow the colonial sentence ‘Africans sold Africans’ to divide the people whose histories were violently joined by the same system of extraction.

References

African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR) (2026), “Press Statement on the Adoption of the United Nations Resolution Recognizing the Transatlantic Slave Trade and Slavery as the Gravest Crime against Humanity,” 26 March 2026.

African Union. 2025. ‘Justice for Africans and People of African Descent Through Reparations.’ Theme of the Year 2025.

Candido, Mariana P. 2013. An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World: Benguela and Its Hinterland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Candido, Mariana P. 2020. ‘The Expansion of Slavery in Benguela during the Nineteenth Century.’ International Review of Social History 65 (S28): 67–92. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859020000140 Cambridge Core

Candido, Mariana P. 2011. ‘African Freedom Suits and Portuguese Vassal Status: Legal Mechanisms for Fighting Enslavement in Benguela, Angola, 1800–1830.’ Slavery & Abolition 32 (3): 447–459. https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2011.588481

CARICOM Reparations Commission. n.d. ‘CARICOM Ten Point Plan for Reparatory Justice.’

Jamaica Gleaner (2026), “Warmington questions exclusion of African slave sellers from reparations debate,” 23 September 2026.

Lovejoy, Paul E. 2012. Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Thomas, Hugh. 1997. The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440–1870. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Thornton, John K. 1998. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World 1400–1800. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

How Disabled Must You Be to Deserve Support?

 

Reform UK's £50 Billion Welfare Plan and the Return of the “Deserving” Disabled Person

There is a question sitting underneath Reform UK's proposed £50 billion reduction in welfare spending that deserves more attention than the headline figure itself.

How disabled must you be before society decides that you deserve support?

Reform UK has proposed one of the most radical restructurings of disability support in recent British politics. Under its proposals, Personal Independence Payment (PIP) for working-age adults would be abolished and replaced with a new Health Security Allowance, with support concentrated on those considered to have the most severe and enduring conditions. The health-related element of Universal Credit would also be abolished. Reporting on the proposals suggests that as many as 2.89 million people could see disability or sickness support removed or changed.

The proposals form part of a much larger attempt to reduce welfare expenditure by approximately £50 billion a year. Reform estimates that around £20 billion of those savings would come from changes affecting disabled and sick people, while another £21 billion would eventually come from restricting most welfare benefits for foreign nationals.

There are legitimate political questions about the sustainability, effectiveness and design of any welfare system. No benefit should be beyond scrutiny simply because its purpose is socially valuable. The government's own recent review of PIP has concluded that the system is not working as it should and requires reform.

But reforming a system is not the same thing as questioning the legitimacy of the people who depend upon it.

And this is where the language surrounding these proposals matters.

The distinction between those who are sufficiently disabled to qualify for continuing financial support and those whose conditions are judged less severe resurrects a very old way of thinking about welfare. It separates disabled people into categories of deservingness.

At one end sits the person whose impairment is severe, visible, permanent and sufficiently incapacitating. This person can be imagined as legitimately dependent. At the other end are millions of people living with chronic illness, fluctuating conditions, neurological conditions, mental distress, pain, fatigue, sensory impairments and other forms of disability whose lives cannot easily be divided into severely incapacitated and capable.

Many disabled people work. Many want to work. Many move between periods of greater and lesser capacity. A person may be able to participate in a meeting and be unable to cook afterwards. Someone may be able to work but unable to use public transport. Someone may walk for a short distance but require a wheelchair for longer journeys. Someone may appear entirely non-disabled during a few hours of public activity while paying for that participation with exhaustion afterwards.

Disability is not an on/off switch.

Yet welfare politics repeatedly attempts to make it one.

This becomes particularly important when disability benefits are discussed through the language of getting people “back to work”, because PIP is not an unemployment benefit. It exists to recognise some of the additional difficulties and costs associated with disability and long-term health conditions. It is not means-tested, and a person can work and receive it.

That distinction matters.

If disability support helps somebody pay for transport because they cannot use a bus, purchase equipment, obtain assistance, heat their home, access prepared food or meet other disability-related costs, removing that support does not automatically make employment more likely. It may make participation harder.

Scope's Disability Price Tag research estimates that disabled households need, on average, an additional £1,095 every month to achieve the same standard of living as comparable non-disabled households. PIP does not come close to eliminating that additional financial burden.

The disability payment, then, is not necessarily the thing keeping somebody outside society.

It may be part of the infrastructure keeping them inside it.

This is where decades of disability scholarship, and particularly the social model of disability, should make us suspicious of any policy that equates support with dependency. Disability cannot be understood simply by looking at what is happening inside an individual's body. People are also disabled by the environments through which they must move.

A person who cannot walk encounters a building with stairs differently from a building with a lift. Someone who cannot drive experiences a town with accessible public transport differently from somewhere in which the only viable alternative is an expensive taxi. A person with fluctuating energy may be able to remain employed because flexible working, technology and practical support make that employment possible.

The body has not necessarily changed. The conditions of participation have.

Money is part of those conditions.

A wheelchair can create mobility. A personal assistant can create independence. Accessible transport can create employment. Technology can create communication. Heating can make a home inhabitable. Practical assistance can enable somebody to conserve limited energy for paid employment, parenting, education or participation in community life.

None of these things removes impairment. They alter the conditions under which somebody lives with it.

This is why the assumption that reducing support necessarily reduces dependency contains such a profound contradiction.

Sometimes support is what makes independence possible.

Remove the infrastructure of participation and then instruct somebody to participate, and we should not be surprised when participation becomes harder.

But disability is only one boundary being redrawn in Reform's welfare proposals. Another concerns nationality.

The proposal has been described as preventing “foreign nationals” from accessing most welfare benefits. That phrase needs examining carefully, because it can easily conjure an image of someone who has recently arrived in Britain and immediately begun claiming benefits. That is not an adequate description of what is being proposed.

Many people living in Britain on temporary immigration routes are already subject to No Recourse to Public Funds and therefore cannot access most mainstream benefits. Reform's proposal goes considerably further. Reporting indicates that its restrictions would extend to people with permanent settlement rights and even EU citizens with settled status — people who may have lived, worked, paid taxes, raised children and built their lives in Britain for many years.

A person can therefore be permanently settled in Britain and still be classified, for the purposes of this proposal, as a “foreign national”.

That changes the nature of the argument.

The question is no longer simply whether newly arrived migrants should have immediate access to the welfare state. It becomes a question about whether nationality itself should determine access to collective protection even after the state has granted somebody permanent membership of British society.

And here disability and migration begin to illuminate something larger.

They are not identical experiences, and intersectional analysis should never pretend that they are. But both reveal the politics of deservingness.

The disabled person must demonstrate sufficient incapacity.

The migrant must demonstrate sufficient belonging.

The unemployed person must demonstrate sufficient willingness to work.

Different groups encounter different tests, but beneath them sits a remarkably similar question:

What must you prove before society accepts that you deserve its support?

For somebody who occupies more than one of these categories, a disabled migrant, for example, those boundaries do not remain neatly separate. A person can simultaneously confront questions about whether their disability is severe enough to deserve support and whether their nationality makes them sufficiently entitled to receive that support in the first place.

That is precisely why welfare policy requires an intersectional lens. Policies written as though “disabled people”, “migrants” and “workers” are entirely separate populations fail to recognise that real human beings inhabit several social positions at once.

Reform's proposal that some long-term benefit claimants deemed capable of employment should undertake around 20 hours of community activity each week or risk losing support raises another version of the same question. There is an important distinction between creating meaningful routes into employment and requiring somebody to perform visible social usefulness in exchange for the material conditions of survival.

The latter tells us something about how we have come to understand citizenship itself.

Perhaps one of the most revealing phrases in the debate is Robert Jenrick's criticism of what he calls “suicidal empathy”.

It is an extraordinary political formulation because it transforms compassion from a social virtue into a potential national danger.

Of course governments have finite resources. Of course welfare expenditure requires choices. And of course poorly designed systems should be changed.

But there is something troubling about a politics in which the danger is imagined to be that society has become too compassionate towards people who require support.

Human dependency is not an aberration. It is part of being human.

Children are dependent. People who become ill are dependent. Many older people become dependent. People recovering from accidents become dependent. Parents depend upon childcare. Workers depend upon transport systems, healthcare and public infrastructure. Businesses depend upon roads, educated employees, courts, policing and functioning financial systems.

None of us is entirely independent.

We have simply constructed some forms of dependency as ordinary and others as moral problems.

Disabled people have repeatedly been required to justify theirs.

There is a legitimate debate to be had about PIP. There is a legitimate debate about assessments, employment, welfare expenditure and how governments can support more disabled people who want to work.

But the starting point cannot be that disability must become catastrophic before its additional costs become legitimate.

That misunderstands disability.

It misunderstands work.

And, perhaps most importantly, it misunderstands independence.

A society committed to disability inclusion should not ask:

How little support can we provide before somebody falls?

It should ask:

What support allows this person to participate as fully as possible?

Those questions emerge from fundamentally different understandings of disability.

One treats support as evidence of dependency.

The other understands that appropriately designed support can create autonomy, participation and contribution.

And that is why the debate about Reform UK's welfare proposals cannot ultimately be reduced to £50 billion on a spreadsheet.

It is a debate about something much more fundamental.

Who do we believe deserves support?

And how disabled — or how British — must somebody become before we are willing to give it?

Jason Arday and the Human Cost of Academic Spectacle

I learned that Jason Arday had died at the age of 41 after spending several days watching the controversy surrounding him unfold with increasing discomfort. Throughout that time, I deliberately resisted joining the rush to pronounce him either guilty or innocent. I did not know the full facts, and investigations were under way. Serious allegations had been raised concerning plagiarism, alongside questions about aspects of his academic and professional record. Those allegations deserved to be examined properly, and academic integrity requires nothing less.

Yet, as the story developed, I became increasingly troubled by something else. It seemed to me that somewhere along the way, the investigation of allegations was becoming the public investigation of a human being. The questions multiplied. What began with questions about plagiarism expanded into questions about where Arday had worked, what he had claimed about his professional history, who had appointed him, who had believed him, what students thought about him, what his appointment said about Cambridge, and eventually what the entire affair supposedly revealed about diversity, DEI, merit and the political left. Each new detail seemed capable of generating another headline or another round of commentary. I found myself wondering, long before his death, at what point legitimate scrutiny becomes something else. At what point is enough, enough?

This matters to me because I did not first encounter Jason Arday as a newspaper headline. I knew him through his scholarship.

I have used his work on race, racism, higher education and mental health because aspects of what he described corresponded with experiences reported by Black participants in my own research. Some of it also resonated with experiences I recognised as a Black academic myself. That does not mean that everything he ever wrote must therefore be correct, nor does it mean that scholarship should be protected from scrutiny because its conclusions resonate with our experiences. Scholarship must withstand examination. But neither can I pretend that the phenomena Arday wrote about suddenly cease to exist because serious questions have subsequently been raised about the scholar.

One of his papers carries a title that is particularly difficult to encounter now: No one can see me cry: understanding mental health issues for Black and minority ethnic academic staff in higher education. Arday wrote about racism, marginalisation and isolation within universities, and about the difficulties minority ethnic academics can encounter in accessing mental-health support that adequately understands racialised experience.

I have heard some of these experiences articulated by research participants. They exist within a wider scholarly literature. I have also spent enough time within higher education to recognise some of these institutional dynamics myself. Whatever investigations may eventually establish about particular aspects of Arday’s scholarship or professional history, the experiences he and others documented cannot simply be erased with the collapse of his reputation. Ideas and social phenomena do not automatically become false because the person associated with articulating them becomes controversial.

None of this diminishes the importance of academic integrity. Plagiarism matters. Accuracy about qualifications and professional experience matters. Universities have an obligation to investigate credible allegations concerning both, regardless of the race, politics, reputation or institutional status of the person involved. If wrongdoing occurred, it should have been established through evidence and dealt with appropriately.

But accountability and humanity are not opposites.

There is a difference between investigating allegations and publicly dismantling a person. Over the course of this controversy, I became increasingly uncomfortable with the momentum surrounding Arday. Details that appeared increasingly distant from the original allegations became material for public consumption. His career, personality, students, previous institutions and the people involved in appointing him became part of an expanding story.

Most troubling to me was the way his individual case began to be absorbed into a much larger ideological argument about diversity. The discussion was no longer confined to whether Jason Arday had committed particular acts of misconduct. His story became material for arguments about DEI, supposedly lowered academic standards, “woke” universities and the legitimacy of diversity initiatives themselves.

That transition matters.

When somebody from a minoritised group succeeds, we are often told that identity should be irrelevant and that individuals should be judged on their own merits. Yet when one of those individuals is accused of wrongdoing, there is a disturbing tendency for the individual suddenly to become representative. A white professor accused of misconduct does not ordinarily provoke a national conversation about whether universities have employed too many white academics. The individual’s alleged behaviour remains, largely, the individual’s alleged behaviour.

One Black professor should not become a referendum on the legitimacy of Black academics.

This controversy therefore raises another question that extends far beyond Jason Arday: what does an institution owe a person while it investigates them?

I do not mean protection from legitimate scrutiny. Nor do I mean immunity from consequences, interference with independent journalism, or institutional declarations of innocence before evidence has been examined. I mean something much more basic: a duty to remember that the person being investigated remains a human being.

Universities have sophisticated mechanisms for dealing with allegations of misconduct. They have committees, regulations, human-resources departments, communications teams, legal advisers and governance structures. Yet I wonder whether our procedures for protecting academic integrity are always accompanied by equally serious thinking about what happens to the person standing at the centre of them.

Who asks whether that person is sleeping? Who asks whether they are eating? Who asks what it is like to wake each morning knowing that another headline, another allegation, another recollection or another social-media discussion may be waiting? Who makes sure that investigation remains investigation rather than becoming social punishment before findings have been reached?

I do not know what support Jason Arday received privately, and it would be wrong for me to claim otherwise. His friends, family, colleagues or university may have provided support about which the public knows nothing. But the broader institutional question remains important. When Arday resigned from Cambridge, he spoke publicly about the profound emotional toll that the accusations, speculation and commentary had taken on him and those close to him. Whatever else we think about the allegations, those words should matter. Behind the controversy was a person experiencing its consequences.

At the time I am writing this, Jason Arday’s cause of death has not been established. Police have described his death as unexpected but not suspicious, and the matter will be referred to the coroner. We therefore should not manufacture an explanation for his death simply because the timing invites us to do so.

I will not do to him in death what troubled me while he was alive: fill gaps in evidence with certainty.

But refusing to speculate about the cause of his death does not require us to stop asking questions about what preceded it. A man publicly described the profound emotional toll that relentless accusations, speculation and commentary were taking on him. Shortly afterwards, at the age of 41, he died. Whatever the eventual findings concerning the cause of his death, surely that chronology should make us pause—not to speculate, but to think seriously about the human cost of the way academic controversies are conducted in public.

There will presumably still be investigations and findings. Questions may eventually be answered about his thesis, his publications, his professional claims and the institutional processes surrounding his appointments. Some allegations may ultimately be substantiated; others may not. We should allow evidence to determine that.

But Jason Arday will never read those final findings. He will never have the opportunity to respond to whatever conclusions are reached. If some allegations are rejected, he will not be here to rebuild the corresponding parts of his reputation. If others are substantiated, he will not be here to account for them.

That leaves higher education with a question considerably larger than one professor: what kind of accountability are we creating?

Due process exists because an allegation is not a finding. Investigation exists because evidence must be examined rather than assumed. And human dignity should not become something temporarily suspended while that process occurs. Even a person eventually found responsible for wrongdoing remains a human being. Someone whose case has not yet been determined certainly does.

I cannot pretend that I experience this story only as a detached observer. I am a Black academic. I write about race, inequality and institutional life. Watching questions about the conduct of one Black scholar expand into commentary about diversity and the legitimacy of Black advancement within universities has been deeply unsettling.

It carries an implication that many Black academics will recognise. If one of us is accused of failing, will our individual conduct be examined, or will our presence itself be put on trial? Will the question be what this particular individual did, or whether people like us should ever have occupied these spaces in the first place?

Those are profoundly different questions.

Jason Arday should have been accountable for Jason Arday. If he had committed academic misconduct, the evidence should have established it and the appropriate processes should have followed. But he should never have been required to carry the legitimacy of Black scholarship, Black professors or diversity in higher education on his shoulders. Neither should any of us.

There is, however, another consequence that will remain after the immediate controversy has subsided. The integrity of other Black academics has been dragged, unnecessarily, into a case that was supposed to concern the conduct of one man. Once commentary begins speaking of “Black mediocrity” in academia, diversity appointments, lowered standards or institutions supposedly privileging race over merit, the accusation is no longer directed solely at Jason Arday. It casts suspicion over Black academics more generally.

That is what I find particularly damaging.

There are Black academics across British universities who obtained their doctorates legitimately, passed examinations, survived vivas, published through peer review, competed for fellowships and jobs, taught students, secured grants, wrote books and built their careers through years of intellectual labour. They should not now find themselves silently required to prove that they are not another Jason Arday. Nor should a Black professor entering a lecture theatre have to wonder whether colleagues or students are looking at them and asking whether they are genuinely qualified or merely the beneficiary of diversity.

This is the damage produced when allegations concerning an individual are transformed into an argument about a group.

And who repairs that damage?

If the investigations ultimately substantiate serious misconduct by Arday, that will establish something about Jason Arday. It will not establish that Black academics are mediocre, that diversity and excellence are incompatible, or that Black scholars have somehow entered universities without meeting academic standards. If some of the allegations are ultimately rejected, the same question of repair becomes even more urgent, because the insinuations about Black academic legitimacy will already have travelled considerably further than any subsequent correction is likely to travel.

There is an asymmetry here that should trouble us. Black academics can spend decades establishing their individual credibility, yet the alleged wrongdoing of one Black academic can suddenly be mobilised as evidence against the collective. We are made individual when we succeed and representative when we fail.

Who, then, takes responsibility for restoring what has been damaged? Who tells the doctoral student, early-career researcher, lecturer or professor who has watched this unfold that their presence in the academy is not now presumptively questionable? Who corrects the suggestion that Black scholarship itself should be approached with greater suspicion? Who repairs the damage when the language of individual accountability has already become the language of racial judgement?

Black academics should not have to perform that repair ourselves. We did not create this collective accusation.

Academic integrity must be defended vigorously. But so must the integrity of academics who have done nothing wrong. If we genuinely believe in individual responsibility, then we must practise it consistently. Jason Arday’s conduct should be judged on the evidence concerning Jason Arday. The scholarly legitimacy of thousands of other Black academics was never on trial.

And so I return to the title of that paper: No one can see me cry.

There is something painfully difficult about those words now. Jason Arday wrote about mental health, racism, marginalisation and isolation within higher education. Today, he is gone.

I do not know what caused his death. I do not know everything that happened privately during these final weeks of his life. I do not know what the investigations would ultimately have concluded. Precisely because I do not know, I refuse to manufacture certainty now.

What I do know is that academic integrity matters. Due process matters. Racism matters. Mental health matters. Human dignity matters. We should be intellectually and morally capable of holding all of those truths at the same time.

Perhaps that is what troubles me most about everything I have watched unfold. Somewhere within the allegations, investigations, headlines, political arguments and social-media commentary, it became remarkably easy to lose sight of the person at their centre.

Jason Arday was not an allegation. He was not a diversity initiative. He was not an argument about DEI. He was not a newspaper spectacle.

He was a human being.

Whatever those investigations would ultimately have concluded, he was entitled to remain a human being while they took place.

May he rest in peace.