This house believes that the Oxford Union has a history of racism it has never acknowledged, which continues to infect its atmosphere and debates to this day. This perhaps would have been the motion I’d have proposed to the most famous debating society in the world. Except, as a young black student at Oxford, I avoided it altogether, finding it an instinctively hostile environment. The few black friends I have from that era who did fork out for membership still talk about the interrogation they faced on the way in, no matter how regularly they visited.

So when I heard what happened to the Ghanaian graduate student Ebenezer Azamati last month, my first impression was admiration that he had persisted in taking part in the union in the first place. Video footage has emerged of Azamati, who is blind, being manhandled by guards before allegedly being dragged from the union chamber, apparently for the crime of having attempted to reserve an accessible seat. It makes for horrific viewing.

The society gave a platform to the Malaysian prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, who said he was proud to be labelled antisemitic

The more you learn about Azamati, the more exceptional a person he seems to be. Aged 25, he was born in Ghana to a family he describes as “very poor” subsistence farmers, the first of his people to go to university, never mind study at Oxford. Everyone who knows him describes him – including in official witness testimony – as a gentle, kind, good-natured, academically gifted person. He is active in his church, with a deep faith, and served as his college’s disability and BME officer.

That he is blind – often sleeping little to make up the extra time required to have library books scanned, fellow students report – makes his achievements all the more remarkable. He reached Oxford through scholarships and the support of benefactors in his church, who recognised his character and talent.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ebenezer Azamati. ‘The more you learn about Azamati, the more exceptional a person he seems to be.’ Photograph: DPIR

Instead of apologising in the wake of this incident, the president of the union, who was still having dinner with the guest speaker, Nicky Morgan, at the time it happened, subsequently called for a disciplinary hearing at which Azamati was charged with “guilty and violent” conduct, and his membership was suspended. That decision has now been overturned and the union has apologised.

The only redeeming feature of this story is the dignity of Azamati, and those who did speak up. These include the Oxford University Africa Society, which staged a successful protest when Theresa May was speaking at the union last week; Helen Mountfield QC, principal of Azamati’s undergraduate college, who represented him at the disciplinary hearing; and Henry Hatwell, a student who interrupted Morgan to voice his anger at the incident. Hatwell, who is Jewish, told me of his own struggles with the union. The society chose to give a platform to the Malaysian prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, who described Jews as “hook-nosed” and said he was proud to be labelled antisemitic, earlier this year. That decision follows a long history of supposedly promoting “free speech” by welcoming the holocaust denier David Irving and the BNP leader Nick Griffin, which led to significant protests in 2007.

Blind student 'dragged from Oxford Union chamber by his ankles' Read more

The union is proud of these controversies, describing itself as “the last bastion of free speech in the western world”. It positions itself as having no political ideology, simply providing a forum for debate. But look a little closer. In 2015 it did host a debate about the colonial legacy and reparations, but countered any idea of being a neutral space sensitive to the pain of that conversation by offering a “colonial comeback” cocktail, illustrated with a black person’s hands in chains. This came almost two centuries after the founding union member and later prime minister William Gladstone – whose family wealth was inherited from slavery – amended a motion for freeing slaves so that it focused on gradual emancipation achieved by Christian education instead.

The University of Oxford’s poor track record in improving access for black students – which has been well documented – and the exclusivity of the union and its atmosphere, have combined to create anything but a democratic space in which student voices of all backgrounds can thrive. It is ironic that this latest incident took place during the union’s annual no-confidence debate – a typically ancient tradition in which the society comes together to debate the legitimacy and performance of Her Majesty’s government. The real no-confidence motion this time should have been in the Oxford Union itself.

• Afua Hirsch is a Guardian columnist