On Norway’s National Day in 2005, marking a century of independence, I was at a function in Oslo when then minister of arts and culture Pallo Jordan arrived. When he saw me, he plonked down his plate of canapes and left the room, angry about something I had written. And so I was unable to alert him to his faux pas: he was wearing a yellow tie with a blue shirt — the national colours of Sweden, Norway’s formal colonial masters. Decolonisation is a keyword in the student protests, but all too often is an instance of the South African essentialism — we’re in the trenches, comrades! — that ended up making Jordan so unpopular with the Norwegians. Many exiled ANC leaders never recovered from being the cocktail circuit darlings of the international anti-apartheid scene, and now their children appear to be engaged in a nostalgic bid to resurrect the same moral high ground on which they were allowed to squat. Decolonisation is as old as Adam and Eve (there are even shades of it in them being...
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