Phillips was among a minute group of black students at Oxford, the majority of whom were in fact African Americans and Africans.
As Phillips recalls in The European Tribe, an African American student doing his doctorate on Martin Luther King Jr. urged him to undertake a five-week Greyhound bus trip through America after his second year at Oxford, which became the first of his three journeys of self-discovery. By this time he had already switched from psychology and neurophysiology to studying literature and had directed six student productions of plays by writers including Harold Pinter, Tennessee Williams, William Shakespeare, and Henrik Ibsen. His experiences in the United States and the riots and disturbances erupting in places such as Notting Hill led Phillips to feel increasingly uneasy with the "rarified and super-traditional college atmosphere": "It caused, as the three years progressed, a tugging at my heart-string, a desire to discover how on earth I'd landed in this place ...
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