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.
I ought of course to tell you how things went, in the years that followed, with this fervent commitment to the Comoros. In the autumn of 1976, Jonas received a letter from none other than President Ali Soilih, who had toppled the new state’s first president, Ahmed Abdallah, from power the previous January. And in this odd letter Ali Soilih, the utopian dreamer who initiated a most peculiar Maoist-cum-Socialist experiment on the islands, thanked Jonas Wergeland for his efforts on behalf of the Comoro Islands’ cause in Scandinavia and maintained that his fight up there in the north had been an inspiration to those fighting for full independence, which, as far as at least three out of the four islands were concerned, had been achieved in 1975. This letter meant such a lot to Jonas Wergeland that he had it framed, like a diploma, and showed it off whenever anyone accused him of lacking political awareness. How Ali Soilih found out that Jonas Wergeland had hoisted the Comorian flag in a school in far-off Norway was a mystery to Jonas and everyone else, and even though there is a very simple explanation I am not going to disclose it here and risk ruining the best part of this tale.
Because from there on, it is the usual story: of a commitment that gradually peters out. In Jonas Wergeland’s defence it should be said that he tried, he tried very hard to follow future developments in the Comoro Islands. Jonas did his best, somewhat resignedly, to keep track of the new parties and alliances that sprang up after his raising of the flag: the PUIC, FNU, UDZIMA, FNUK-UNIKOM and FD, to name but a few of the permutations of initials that Jonas found increasingly abstract. He valiantly endeavoured to keep abreast and still more valiantly to understand what was going on down there on those islands in the Indian Ocean: the power struggles and political proclamations. Not least, he tried to understand the employment and the presence of foreign mercenaries, primarily French, in various coups d’états. It almost became something of a hobby, rather like stamp collecting; Jonas Wergeland collected piece after piece of an African reality, the only thing being that the more pieces he accumulated the less he understood any of it. The Comoro Islands actually afforded an angle onto the whole African dilemma, lying as they did off the continent, like a lens through which the mainland could be viewed. The whole gamut of depressing factors was to be found there: a mixed-bag of ethnic groups, a ruinous colonial past, overpopulation, extreme poverty, food shortages, high infant mortality rate, low life expectancy, illiteracy, one-sided exports, political intrigue, governmental chaos, coups, abortive utopian socialism, mercenaries, the Muslim syndrome: a disheartening sum which in the end Jonas found impossible to add up. Or perhaps it was simply that he could not figure it out, not even after the mathematical breakthrough that brought him insight into equations involving several unknowns, the problem of infinity. Sometime in the mid-eighties — and, quite honestly, who can blame him? — Jonas Wergeland gave up, mind reeling, battered and bruised by incomprehensible facts. He threw in the towel. The Comoro Islands and Africa won on a technical knockout.
But as far as his debate with the Young Socialists as a high-school student, in the schoolyard, in that shed was concerned — that Jonas won. And it is important, as it was for Jonas Wergeland, to feel at least at one point in your life that you have an overview and that, perhaps precisely because of that overview, you manage to light on a cause that has not been taken up by everyone else. So even though, in the long run, the Comoro Islands affair ended in defeat, for Jonas Wergeland it represented unequivocal proof — as witness the letter from Ali Soilih — that it does actually pay to step in and do something to change the world. In those terms, Jonas Wergeland’s fight for the Comoro Islands was a glorious victory and, if I may say so, an example worth emulating.