Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

It was a strange sight, and Jonas suddenly found himself wishing that Nefertiti could have seen it, not only because the demonstration had been very much in Nefertiti’s spirit but because it was the same turntable ladder truck that they had so often stopped to admire on their way to Torggata Baths. Jonas was downright proud to be the cause of such a singular to-do: the fire engine in the middle of the schoolyard and the ladder with a man in uniform at the top of it, sweating and straining to undo Jonas’s ingenious pulley contraption from the cable and so ‘lower’ the green flag of the Comoros, now fluttering over Norwegian soil for the first time.

By lunch-time that same day, long before the rector had completed his assiduous and vengeful hunt for the sinner, which would in due course require Jonas to draw on all of his newly won rhetorical skills, Jonas got into an almighty row with the school’s resident Young Socialists, who had long since figured out that Jonas Wergeland, that exasperating, swell-headed provocateur, had to be the man behind this weird demonstration, a demonstration which, even before they learned the motives behind it, they regarded as a deplorable act of heresy. And it was here, in a school shed, during the subsequent discussion, that Jonas Wergeland put the Cath’s Young Socialists so firmly in their place that for a long time afterwards students at the school, or at any rate those who heard about it and spread the rumours, found it hard to take the Young Socialists and their policies seriously.

Jonas, knowing as he did that attack is the best form of defence, began by asking what they knew about the Comoro Islands, these characters who spoke with such absolute certainty about the sorry state of the world, of imperialism and the class struggle in general — and, he added triumphantly, the necessity of a good education, not least for the cadres, among whose number these Cath Socialists counted themselves. This immediately gave rise to a lot of shifty looks in the Young Socialist ranks because of course they did not know the first thing about the Comoro Islands. Then, before they could gather themselves together, Jonas smartly fired off a round of questions, first of a geographical nature — what were the names of the four main islands, what was the capital called and what did they associate with the name ‘Kartala’ and suchlike — before switching to questions which he answered himself as he went along, regarding the current economic situation and social conditions in the Comoros. What did they export? What did they import? What was the average life expectancy? And by dint of these questions and answers he succeeded, quite cunningly, in presenting a picture of the tremendous poverty on the islands and the horrendous political decisions that had led the kingdom to the point where everything centred on vanilla pods, cloves and ylang-ylang essence for the perfume industry, leaving the people in abject poverty with no agriculture to feed them, which, and here he played his trump card, brought him to the question of who — who! — was to blame for this appalling misrule or, to put it another way, which country had been the colonial power, and indeed still looked upon the Comoros as its own overseas territory? And he stared hard at these faces, surprisingly many of which sported glasses with black frames, wreathed in greasy hair, with FNL badges stuck directly under their chins as if it were some sort of fashion, or a uniform, but none of which could supply the answer: France. That’s right dammit: France, the most cynical of all countries when it came to its activities outside its own borders, making the English look like out-and-out humanists by comparison when it came to foreign policy and the building of infrastructures in their colonies. It really was incredible, that these guys, these Young Socialists, didn’t know about France and the Comoro Islands, seeing as how, when you came right down to it, France was also at the bottom of that unscrupulous conflict in Vietnam, which the Young Socialists were supposed to be such experts on, going on about it as if they had personally spent at least a year fighting in the jungle.

There stood Jonas Wergeland — in the schoolyard of Oslo Cathedral School, in that shed in which the students could shelter in foul weather — generating, aptly enough, a veritable storm of arguments and critical questions and harangues that made those poor, and in their own eyes, radical and politically conscious Young Socialists cower as if seeking shelter from a thunderstorm. And Jonas had not yet come to his pièce de résistance , namely, to ask, to no avail, of course, whether they could outline the political situation in the Comoro Islands. And you can take it from me, gaining any sort of overview of the political situation in the Comoros at that time was no easy task. But Jonas really let them have it, he inundated those ignorant, so-called activists with facts about the traditional Comorian parties, the UDC, the RDCP and the UMMA, also known as the ‘greens’, the ‘whites and the ‘white-oranges’, and thereafter on MOLINACO, PEC, PASCO and ASEC, all of whom were in opposition, more or less socialist and illegal, as well as the conservative MPM. Jonas rained these acronyms, a whole alphabet of them, down on their heads, only rarely giving the full French designations of the abbreviations, letting these Young Socialists see just what it was like to hear someone talking political double Dutch. But the worst, or the best, of it was that at this point Jonas Wergeland truly did have mastery of this bewildering mishmash of different political constellations and standpoints as to whether they should forge even stronger ties with France, or fight for full independence — a mishmash that would have formed a fantastic breeding ground for support groups from all manner of factions — and, I might add: a lot of entertainment — if only more Norwegians had taken an interest in the Comoro Islands. And believe me: it took some doing for a Norwegian to differentiate between Mouzaoir Abdallah and Ahmed Abdallah, or tell the difference between Saïd Mohamed Cheikh, Prince Saïd Ibrahim and Prince Saïd Mohamed Jaffar.

But it did not stop there: Jonas Wergeland also succeeded, thanks to his newly acquired command of the rhetorical devices — by which I mean not necessarily the classic form but a pawky Norwegian, social-democratic variant — in delivering all of this in the form of outrageously convoluted arguments involving sentence constructions verging on a complexity comparable only to that of the larger molecules in organic chemistry — while at the same time hammering home rebukes and stressing points with such expressions as ‘it must be resoundingly clear’ and ‘quite the reverse’ — bringing the whole thing to a conclusion with a question shaped as a calculated complaint, while in a vacant corner of his mind he sent his grateful thanks to Anne B., whom he had spied over by the stairs leading to the girls’ gym, as to why in the world every radical in Norway had to fight for the same cause. Why did they all have to flock like sheep around the Vietnam banner? Surely there were other countries deserving of our solidarity and our attention, countries that were struggling to rid themselves of the yoke of colonialism? How could people who called themselves revolutionaries and who were supposedly fighting for the Third World not know shit about the Comoro Islands? It was a fucking revolutionary disgrace! Jonas flung out an arm, taking in all those FNL badges not to mention Mao badges and all sorts of other badges: some of these guys had chests like kids in the school band with a lot of jamborees under their belts or old Soviet soldiers celebrating a national holiday. In that shelter in the schoolyard of Oslo Cathedral School, Jonas closed his fiery speech on the Comoro Islands with an indirect denunciation of his schoolfellows’ apathy, their superficiality , their blinkered outlook — which of course led one to suspect that it was not Vietnam, say, that mattered to them; they were not interested in the world, they were interested only in power, in manipulating. Vietnam was simply an excuse to flaunt themselves and their ironclad egos; the actual object of their hate was neither here not there. So in closing let me just add, for the record, that Jonas’s thundering denunciation was in no wise prompted by a reckless urge to heap abuse on the superficial commitment and political narcissism of Norwegian youth. At that moment Jonas Wergeland was the Comoro Islands champion in Norway, right then it was important to him, more important than anything else, that the students at the Cath should be told about this island kingdom in the Indian Ocean.