Oxford vs. Harvard: Melville Roberts Wields the Dagger of Defamation Against Alagi Yorro Jallow 

By  Kebeli Demba Nyima, Atlanta, GA

When John Stuart Mill debated James Fitzjames Stephen on the limits of liberty, when Isaiah Berlin countered the iron certainties of Marxist historicism, or when Bertrand Russell duelled with Father Frederick Copleston on the BBC over the existence of God, it was not for intellectual grandstaning, nor was it driven by personal animus. These men of Oxford and Harvard regarded the contest of ideas as a sacred obligation, a duty to truth and to the refinement of thought through civil and exacting exchange, where knowledge was pursued as a moral enterprise and disagreement treated as the catalyst of enlightenment.

As such, the rivalry between Oxford and Harvard classical scholars has never been a matter of alumni snobbery or transatlantic sneering. It was forged in the crucible of moral philosophy and jurisprudence, in the enduring clash between empiricism and idealism, ancient discipline and New World reform. So, if Oxford gave us A.J. Ayer, H.L.A. Hart, and Mary Warnock, Harvard replied with Rawls, Frankfurter, and Santayana—thinkers who shaped legal thought and public morality on both sides of the Atlantic.

Even in moments of ferocious disagreement, such as Rawls versus Nozick or Berlin against the Marxist determinists, the argument was elevated. One cited sources. One submitted ideas to the review of history and the scrutiny of peers. The ad hominem was not merely discouraged; it was treated as a confession of intellectual bankruptcy. To invoke one’s institutional pedigree was not a shield but a summons to higher standards.

And yet, what we confront today is a perverse parody of that tradition. That someone once affiliated with an Ivy League university, or claiming to bear the intellectual mantle of a place like Oxford, should descend into the muck of personal grievance and baseless accusation is not merely disappointing. It is vulgar. One might expect a man of such education to be lecturing at universities, publishing rigorous editorial commentaries, acting as a diligent reviewer for reputable peer-reviewed journals, or working as a research fellow in a think tank shaping public policy. Instead, we find him loitering on social media, weaponising his CV, and constructing imaginary enemies to explain the consequences of his own collapse.

This raises a more pressing question: what is the role of the intellectual in modern society? It has been asked by figures as varied as Julien Benda, Edward Said, and Raymond Aron. The answer has never been comfort. It has always been clarity, courage, and public honesty. And on this count, Melville Robertson Roberts has failed. Not just personally, but institutionally. He has brought dishonour to the traditions he claims to represent. Roberts, a man who invokes the name of Oxford yet writes like a third-rate colonial court clerk nursing a persecution complex. His recent public missive against Alagi Yorro Jallowis not a critique. It is a slanderous dirge, stitched together from wounded vanity, personal speculation, and that peculiar form of envy reserved for men who know they will never again be taken seriously.

Simply put, the ongoing imbroglio involving Melville Roberts and Alagie Yorro Jallow cannot honestly be dignified as a confrontation of ideas in the venerable tradition of Oxbridge disputation or Harvardian dialectic; rather, it is an episode characterized by the unmistakable odour of personal animosity, in which Mr. Roberts, provoked by a steady and evidently discomfiting stream of anonymous exposés that have laid bare not only his own alleged misconduct but the pretensions and failings of a coterie of half-baked Gambian intellectuals.

It is a spectacle that would have confounded the sensibilities of any Victorian editor acquainted with the etiquette of controversy, for while Mr. Roberts has been content to wage a campaign of accusation and insinuation, resorting to the sort of public melodrama that might have filled the columns of a penny dreadful, Mr. Jallow has, by contrast, demonstrated a classical and, indeed, almost archaic self-restraint, comporting himself in a manner befitting those whom Matthew Arnold described as “the best that has been thought and said in the world,” providing evidence, marshalling argument with a cool head, and refusing, in the face of provocation, to stoop to insult, belittlement, or the sort of imaginative falsehoods that too often poison public discourse in our time.

What beggars belief, however, is the unreflective compulsion, almost Pavlovian among certain Gambian public men to invoke the name of Alagie Yorro Jallow whenever a work of critical piece or literary distinction disrupts their torpor. It is as though, like Prospero, commands the spirits of intellectual mischief. But this is less recognition than confession; an open admission that the republic of letters, for them, contains but one resident.

One scarcely need consult the index of recent polemics to see the repetitious absurdity. Only a fortnight past, Sam Sarr whose acquaintance with genuine argument is as fleeting as a London fog unleashed the familiar, groundless imputation upon Jallow. The attentive reader, acquainted with the contours of Jallow’s corpus, will at once detect the error. For those who actually know Jallow or who have followed his career with even minimal attention, the suggestion that he would hide behind a pseudonym is laughable. This is a man who, during the darkest days of the Jammeh dictatorship, wrote blistering editorials under his own name while still living within the borders of a state that jailed, harassed, and silenced dissidents with impunity. His newspaper was firebombed. He was arrested, along with several of his reporters. Still, he wrote on—undaunted, unmasked.

Jallow was no ghostwriter. He was a lion.

To work under him was to witness firsthand a rare breed of editorial leadership: intellectually exacting, ethically uncompromising, and unwavering in the belief that journalism should not cower before power. His influence is real but it does not lurk in anonymous columns or unsigned missives. It lives in the standards he set, the courage he modeled, and the generations of journalists he mentored.

Thus, the habit of attributing every bold critique to Jallow says far more about the intellectual poverty of his accusers than it does about his supposed ubiquity. They do not see ghosts; they reveal the shadows of their own insecurity. In their inability to recognize or tolerate multiplicity of voice, they inadvertently honor Jallow not by understanding his work, but by proving how irreplaceable his voice truly is.

In fact, what makes Melville’s accusations all the more contemptible is this: Alagie Yorro Jallow once risked his own reputation to defend him at a time when few dared to be seen at his side. Mr. Jallow, a man educated at Harvard and shaped by the university’s tradition of intellectual rigor and moral seriousness, publicly defended Melville’s right to due process when the national mood was one of abandonment and silence. His defense was not born of friendship, but of principle—of a deep commitment to the rule of law and to the dignity of public life. His words were signed, published, and delivered in broad daylight. He did not whisper from the shadows; he stood in the open, as civilised men do when others succumb to cowardice. He told the truth and allowed it to stand.

The fact that Jallow openly admitted, without bluster or excuse, that he once defended an alleged rapist makes a powerful statement about his willingness to confront his own mistakes—an honesty and humility rarely seen among public figures, especially in a society where denial and evasion often prevail on such grave matters.

Melville Roberts, never content to limit his accusations, has seen fit to drag a veritable procession of names—Augustus Mendy, Kalilu Touray, Fatou Touray, Pa Modou Bojang and others—into his personal melodrama. One might think, judging by his tone, that correcting a man’s grammar was tantamount to dragging his name through the mud. Yet even the greenest cub reporter in London or the oldest hand at The Spectator knows that grammatical correction is not character assassination. It is, at worst, pedantry; at best, a public service.

Roberts claims the anonymous writer is engaged in character assassination and victim creation. If only he understood that in British journalism, and in any country with a mature press, parody, satire, and even a touch of the sensational are not evidence of malice but accepted tools for scrutinising the powerful. Ask Bora Mboge or Alieu Famara Sagnia; both would doubtless chuckle at the idea that a satirical jab is an existential threat. Bora Mboge, one of the early Gambian journalists trained at Cardiff University, where the ethics and rigours of Fleet Street were taught to the first generation of Commonwealth reporters, would be the first to affirm that tough commentary is part of the trade. In Arkell v. Pressdram (1971), a case involving Private Eye magazine, the publication was threatened with a libel suit for its satirical reporting. Its reply—”We refer you to the reply given in the case of Arkell v. Pressdram”—became legendary shorthand for press defiance against legal intimidation. That spirit endures. Satire and parody have been the backbone of serious British journalism from the days of Punch and Private Eye to the present. A public figure who cannot weather them is fit neither for high office nor for the rough-and-tumble of public debate.

Yet, the greater irony is that Roberts, who struts about as a lawyer and scholar, is in fact neither by any standard worth its salt. The true test of scholarship in the modern age is publication: peer-reviewed articles, law review essays, a record of public lectures, or at least a respectable thesis. One looks for the evidence. But search for Melville’s contribution to law, literature, or public policy and you are met with silence. What, one wonders, has this self-anointed Oxford man actually produced? Is there a law journal, an academic press, or even a footnote to which he can point? In the time-honoured tradition of Dunning and Denning, British lawyers write, they publish, they defend their ideas in the open. Has Roberts done so? If so, he keeps it as well hidden as the Ark of the Covenant.

To claim the mantle of Oxford, or of any learned society, is to submit oneself to the discipline of peer review and the judgement of one’s intellectual equals. Jallow has done so; his record in journalism and public debate is a matter of public record. Roberts, by contrast, has achieved notoriety only by proximity to power, not by the arduous work of scholarship. If this is what Oxford now celebrates, one shudders for the Bodleian. It is not the length of one’s CV nor the volume of one’s accusations that marks a scholar, but the tangible, testable contributions one leaves to the public good. On that measure, Melville Roberts is found wanting, and no amount of media bluster will hide the fact.

Who is Really Melville Roberts and who is Alagie Yorro Jallow?

These names are well-known in Gambian public life, but their backgrounds and reputations could not be more different. In a more orderly and rational world, these two might have stood shoulder to shoulder, inheritors of a tradition that prizes not merely academic attainment but the shaping of statesmen, public intellectuals, and servants of the common good. That, however, is where the symmetry ends, and the bitter contrast begins.

Melville Roberts is a former Gambian diplomat who was schooled at the oldest English-speaking university in the world—Oxford. He was, at first glance, everything a young republic might wish for: articulate, Anglophilic, and urbane. He dressed like a character out of Brideshead Revisited and spoke with the studied cadence of a man who had spent too long rehearsing his virtue in the mirror of colonial mimicry. He made his debut into public life with the poise of a man bred for diplomacy, the kind who would quote Locke at the airport and Cicero at a cocktail party.

His rise through the foreign service was meteoric. At an age when many of his contemporaries were still deciphering the awkward grammar of adulthood—learning the ropes of life and bureaucracy—Roberts was already seated at the high tables of protocol. He was appointed Deputy Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs before he turned thirty-five, a position usually reserved for seasoned mandarins with grey temples and dusty degrees. He cut an unforgettable figure: six-foot-two, dark and impeccably tailored, with a resonant baritone that could render microphones redundant. When Melville spoke, it was less a sentence and more a pronouncement—like the BBC World Service read through a cathedral organ. He exuded the presence of a young Sir Wilfred in The Third Man, crossed with the theatrical poise of an Etonian Hamlet.

Indeed, his voice alone commanded rooms. He didn’t need to shout—his tone carried both authority and affectation, as though every syllable had first been ironed and polished. His mastery of oratory made him an irresistible addition to diplomatic receptions and state dinners, especially in a service where most of his peers struggled to conjugate policy into prose. In a civil service still recovering from colonial hangovers and filled with middle-aged men holding dusty O-Levels, Roberts was something of a unicorn: university-educated, foreign-trained, and Oxford-finished. By Gambian standards, he was immaculate—perhaps too immaculate.

It was not just his résumé that distinguished him, but the mythology that trailed him like an expensive cologne. Parents whispered his name to their sons as aspirational folklore. Young girls swooned, not merely because of his looks, but because of what he represented: a passported future, a man who dined with diplomats and could recite Tennyson from memory. He was the dream candidate, the perfect composite of colonial refinement and post-independence ambition. That he was sent to Oxford—dream destination of any self-respecting African Anglophile—was both a mark of state investment and personal distinction. To study there was to be marked for greatness. Few in the entire Foreign Ministry, let alone his generation, had come close to such distinction.

But the tragedy of Roberts lies precisely in this overproduction of myth. For what begins as promise too often calcifies into pretence. The carefully arranged persona—suited, scented, and syllabled—began to show cracks. A man who had been told from youth that he was exceptional, irreplaceable even, began to believe in his own infallibility. He drank from the poisoned chalice of unearned reverence. Like Narcissus by the water, he fell in love not with diplomacy, nor with duty, but with the performance of being Melville Roberts.

His name began to appear in tabloids, then in courtrooms. Whispers of misconduct, of impropriety, of allegations too sordid for the gossip columns yet too frequent to ignore, started trailing him like shadows. Instead of confronting them with statesmanship, he retreated into indignation and deflection, seeking refuge in procedural technicalities and interpretive gymnastics. His defenders called him a target of envy, a misunderstood genius, a political pawn. But the allegations—grave, persistent, and chilling—spoke to a pattern of entitlement rather than a conspiracy of coincidence.

He would eventually face accusations of sexual violence, including rape—charges that sent tremors through the diplomatic and legal communities. The matter reached the ECOWAS Court, where his legal team triumphed on technical grounds. But this was not exoneration in the moral sense. The ruling was no declaration of innocence; it was a dismissal based on admissibility and jurisdiction. Still, Roberts paraded it as vindication, waving it in the air like a knight’s sword after a bloodless duel. Those who understood law knew better. A case thrown out is not a man declared clean, as one West African jurist wrote at the time. But nuance is rarely welcome in the court of public spectacle.

In the months that followed, Roberts rebranded. He became a social media essayist, a cultural critic, a self-appointed intellectual. He wrote op-eds filled with Latin aphorisms and borrowed gravitas. He mocked feminism, derided his accusers, and cloaked his bitterness in the garments of rhetorical flourish. To the untrained reader, he sounded wise. But to those familiar with the art of sophistry, it was clear: this was a man hiding behind quotation marks, a rhetorical ventriloquist using dead men’s words to justify his own collapse.

The real tragedy is not that Melville Roberts fell, but that he was never asked to rise in the right way. He was adored too soon, too thoroughly, and too uncritically. He mistook acclaim for immunity and forgot that prestige, like porcelain, cracks under pressure. And so, the young man once likened to a West African Henry Kissinger has instead become a cautionary tale—a faded portrait in the diplomatic gallery, a reminder that Oxford may confer degrees, but not decency.

Alagie Yorro Jallow

If Melville Roberts is the tragedy of overpolish, of a man seduced by surface, then Alagi Yorro Jallow is the parable of substance over ceremony. He did not enter the national conscience by virtue of inheritance, nor by parading Oxford laurels or quoting Montesquieu to impress a ministerial crowd. He emerged not from the wood-panelled halls of privilege, but from the unforgiving trenches of journalism and civic education—disciplines that demand the steady hand, the enduring conscience, and the unsparing pen. Unlike Roberts, who spoke with the intent to seduce, Jallow writes to provoke, to awaken, and—on occasion—to offend.

His moral courage recalls the solitary figures of history who defied fashion to tell uncomfortable truths. In the tradition of Tom Paine, Chinua Achebe, and even a touch of Juvenal, Jallow has positioned himself as the nation’s necessary irritant—the gadfly of the Gambian polis. His prose is not concerned with flattery or self-preservation. It is aimed like a scalpel, not a perfume bottle. While others pursue ambassadorships and consultancy sinecures, Jallow has clung, often thanklessly, to the duties of conscience. In doing so, he has made enemies of cowards and allies of the disenfranchised.

Educated in the rough-and-tumble of Gambian newsrooms before later refining his worldview as a fellow at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation, Jallow embodies the best of both worlds: the local and the global, the vernacular and the scholarly. He writes with the urgency of a village griot and the rigour of a policy analyst. His sentences carry the weight of moral inquiry, not academic vanity. Where Roberts performs intelligence, Jallow interrogates it. And while Roberts may quote Plato to impress, Jallow invokes him to warn. One recalls Plato’s maxim: “The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.” It might well be the epigraph to Jallow’s life’s work.

His critics are predictable and tiresome. They accuse him of being everywhere—of appearing too often in the public square, of speaking too frequently on matters of the day. But that is the fate of the modern-day Cassandra: to be both omnipresent and misunderstood. The true intellectual is not a recluse but a participant. Jallow has chosen to do the dirty work of democratic vigilance. He shows up when it is inconvenient, writes when it is dangerous, and speaks when silence would buy him comfort. In an age of cowards masquerading as technocrats, his candour is as rare as it is necessary.

He has made no pretence of sainthood. His style can be confrontational, even barbed. But his record stands. When the Barrow regime began to erode civic space under the guise of reform, it was Jallow who raised the first alarm. When former strongmen returned in digital disguise to whitewash their records, it was Jallow who named them. When journalists became apologists, and scholars turned to court jesters, Jallow remained unbought, unbossed, and unsilenced. He is no icon carved from marble; he is a man of ink, scars, and stubborn idealism.

One may accuse him of verbosity, but never of duplicity. Unlike the polished performers who adorn panels and embassy circuits with rehearsed indignation, Jallow’s commitment is proven in ink and effort. His columns, scattered across African media archives, are a chronicle of conscience—part prophecy, part provocation. He does not curry favour; he issues challenge. In an age when truth is filtered through algorithms and courage outsourced to hashtags, Jallow has made a career out of showing up. Not in the corridors of power, but in the forums of resistance.

His understanding of power is not academic—it is visceral. He knows that dictatorship begins with euphemism, that tyranny often rides in on the back of reform. His pen is not for sale. And that, more than his Harvard fellowship or his civic seminars, is why he remains dangerous to those who fear a literate electorate. For Jallow does not simply report; he interprets. He does not merely react; he reconstructs. He belongs not to any party, but to a dying tradition: the public intellectual who sees politics not as theatre, but as duty.

In a country where moral fatigue has become the currency of compromise, Jallow stands as a relic of a more demanding age—when integrity mattered more than access, when saying “no” had a cost. He has not always been celebrated. He has been mocked, slandered, and misattributed. Indeed, there are those who now attach his name to every anonymous dissenting editorial, as though he alone possesses the vocabulary of rebuke. It is a strange compliment, and a telling indictment of the intellectual drought in the land.

And so, if Roberts is remembered as the Oxford-educated showman who could not resist the temptation of self-mythology, then Jallow must be remembered as the quiet scourge of hypocrisy—armed not with a title, but with a pen. One sought glamour; the other sought truth. One climbed the ladder of appearances; the other dug into the roots of public life. And in that divergence lies a lesson for a nation forever teetering between illusion and integrity.

Concluding Thoughts

In the final reckoning, the contrast between Melville Roberts and Alagi Yorro Jallow is not merely one of biography—it is a distinction between posture and principle, between the borrowed glow of institutions and the self-forged fire of conviction. One is the child of ceremonial ascent, the other of civic descent; and their respective trajectories form a parable as old as the Republic itself.

Roberts came garlanded—swathed in Oxford’s twilight, armed with baritone eloquence and bespoke tailoring, a man seemingly summoned from the footnotes of a Graham Greene novel. He knew how to enter a room, how to quote the canon, how to charm even his detractors with the oil of practiced diplomacy. But like a gilded reliquary with nothing inside, his form eventually outshouted his substance. What began as the ascent of a statesman dissolved into the decadence of a narcissist—an actor who mistook applause for moral license, and who thought the courtroom was merely another stage.

Jallow, by contrast, never auditioned. He did not rehearse his lines before the mirror of elite approval. His voice, often unfashionable and undiplomatic, was forged in the furnace of truth-telling—where saying the right thing is never as dangerous as saying the honest one. He is the inheritor of the Socratic burden: that the examined life, though turbulent, is the only one worth living. He is not slick. He is sincere. He does not parade his affiliations; he earns his readers’ trust the old-fashioned way—by writing, and standing by what he writes.

In Roberts, we see the failure of our worship of credentials over character, of accent over accountability. In Jallow, we glimpse the stubborn survival of civic courage in a country too often allergic to scrutiny. One is a ghost dressed in garments borrowed from empire; the other, a voice carved from the native rock of resistance. That their names are now so often uttered in the same breath is not evidence of their parity, but of our confusion as a society—our tendency to mistake the decorated for the deserving.

Gambia, like all young nations, has a choice to make. It can continue to elevate the dazzling but hollow, the smooth-talking emissaries of vanity who brandish degrees as if they were moral immunities. Or it can rediscover the unfashionable virtues—honesty, consistency, courage—that Jallow imperfectly but doggedly represents. The former may win headlines; the latter shapes history.

As Cicero once said in the Roman Senate, “The welfare of the people is the highest law.” And in times such as ours, it may fall not to ministers or diplomats to safeguard that law, but to writers who refuse to be silent, and who—without medals, microphones, or mandates—defend the truth against the velvet lies of officialdom. In that struggle, between appearance and reality, between Oxford’s ghost and Harvard’s conscience, it is not hard to see where the future must lie—if it is to be a just one.