Around lunchtime last Wednesday I was feeling pretty pleased with myself. Visiting Oxford for the day, I had, as is my wont, gone on a prowl of the local second-hand bookshops and in the Oxfam store on St Giles had struck gold: a signed first edition of Penelope Fitzgerald’s masterpiece The Blue Flower, for just four quid. Someone had boobooed – these can be worth up to £200. Bliss.

I glanced slyly at the bloke behind the counter, who, this being Oxford, had a wizardy white beard trailing down to his knees and was discussing the short stories of Saki with a passing professor. Every book collector knows that such moments of serendipity come along all too rarely.

Often they’re not to be trusted. Had I missed something? Was the novel absent its final page? Had a previous owner scrawled obscenities above every chapter heading? And given Oxfam is a charity seeking to end world poverty, should I fess up and offer them a bit extra?

Students march past Oxford University's Oriel College and the statue of Cecil Rhodes that they are campaigning to be removed from the building

The answers to these questions were, no, no, no and stuff that. I grabbed a couple of old Penguin paperbacks to create a non-suspicious bundle, put on my most guileless expression, fished out my wallet and headed over to dusty old Gandalf.

It was then the genteel atmosphere was interrupted by distant chanting. Indecipherable to begin with, it quickly began to increase in volume: some kind of protest march was taking place. Suddenly the show was upon us, as a crowd of around 100 students came to a halt outside the bookshop. ‘De-de-decolonise!’ bellowed a young man, and the throng stuttered it back at him loudly and passionately.

My first thought was that if he was talking about the British Empire, he was about a century too late; my second, that if he was referring to the bookshop, I was honestly planning to get my devolved Scottish backside out of there just as soon as I’d bagged the Penelope Fitzgerald.

‘Power to the people!’ yelled the chap, as the call-and-response continued. Next, there was a phrase I later discovered to be ‘amandla ngawethu’, which means ‘the power is ours’ and is a rallying cry from South Africa’s anti-apartheid fight. There was some rapping, some throwing of shapes, and lots of home-made banners. It was raining quite heavily. It looked like fun, if you’re 19 and that’s your idea of fun and you have a hood on your jacket.

Oriel College in Oxford has decided to keep its statue of Cecil Rhodes despite the Rhodes Must Fall campaign

After about ten minutes the students moved on and it seemed safe to venture out into the street. But as I wandered off in search of another cobwebby bookhole I quickly stumbled across them again. Almost literally, this time: they were lying on the wet ground, playing dead, while someone read a poem in plummy tones.

I was witnessing the latest stunt by the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ movement – a ‘mass march for decolonisation’, no less. The campaign began in South Africa as a successful attempt to have a statue of Cecil Rhodes, the Victorian imperialist and founder of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), removed from the University of Cape Town and, commendably, to hasten racial transformation throughout the country’s higher education system.

Supremacist

It has now spread to universities around the world, including California, Edinburgh and Oxford, where a statue of Rhodes stands over the entrance to Oriel College.

Now, Cecil Rhodes was, to put it politely, a man of his time – and that time was when much of the global map was coloured pink and a great many pale males held the kind of views that, expressed on Twitter today, get people into serious trouble.

The demonstrators are calling for statues of colonial era figures including Cecil Rhodes to be removed from university campuses

He was a white supremacist who believed the world would be a better place if everything was run by the civilised British – indeed, an early draft of his will suggested the creation of a ‘Secret Society’ to bring about just that outcome.

But it’s more complicated than that. He also set up and funded the famous Rhodes Scholarship for students from countries under British rule (or formerly so) to study at Oxford, with the intention of promoting good leadership and ‘rendering war impossible’ by building friendship between the great powers. Its recipients have included a large number of men and women who have gone on to real eminence, from the astronomer Edwin Hubble to the writer Robert Penn Warren, from Bram Fischer, an anti-apartheid activist and lawyer for Nelson Mandela, to Bill Clinton.

Indeed, one of the leaders of last week’s protest, South African-born Ntokozo Qwabe, is a Rhodes scholar. He had this to say: ‘What does it mean to study at a university? Who controls what is taught? Who controls how the space is configured? Oxford purports to be one of the best institutions in the world. Is it? Or is it only for a specific thing?’

Students hold a brief 'lie-in' outside Oxford University's Rhodes house library about removing colonial era statues, including Cecil Rhodes, from the university buildings

These are all reasonable questions, not all of which are easy to answer. But here’s another poser: why did Mr Qwabe feel able to accept a scholarship in the name of his apparent nemesis? And another: if you’re lucky enough to get the chance to pass fleetingly through one of the world’s finest and most ancient academic institutions, shouldn’t you show a degree of appreciation, historical tolerance and respect?

There’s surely a difference between campaigning for more diverse racial representation among the student demographic and demanding that the university starts tearing down statues you don’t like. Chris Patten, Oxford’s chancellor, suggests those pursuing the latter aim should consider going elsewhere to study – inflammatory, perhaps, but you can see his point.

There’s also something rather worrying about the importation of South Africa’s toxic racial politics to Britain’s campuses. The UK of 2016 is not the UK of 1816; it is a reconstructed, multicultural, enlightened, progressive society – an international ‘safe space’, to borrow a current student buzz-phrase. In part this is because, having made historical mistakes, we have learned from them. Our imperial statuary helps us remember.

I thought of the Oxford students as I walked through Glasgow’s George Square last week. There, in a tent perched on a strip of grass, members of the Scottish Resistance have vowed to remain until independence is achieved from the rest of the UK, despite a referendum on the issue 18 months ago. There are many differences between the protests – not least, the IQ levels of those involved – but it strikes me they have two things in common. One, they have picked the wrong fight at the wrong time, and two, the imperialism they so furiously march and chant against exists only in their own imaginations.

TOXIC TRUMP POISONS POLITICS One of the worst things about the rise of Donald Trump has been the reintroduction of violence to the presidential race One of the worst things about the rise of Donald Trump has been the reintroduction of violence to the presidential race. Last week a stetsoned yahoo was caught on camera punching a black protester who was being removed from a Trump rally. On Saturday another film showed Trump cower as a man breached security and ran towards him. This is all the inevitable culmination of Trump’s disgraceful, inflammatory rhetoric in a country where racial tensions have been rising and where the Republican establishment has for too long indulged and even wallowed in the creation of division. Since the Clinton era, the GOP has increasingly refused to play by normal democratic rules, preferring to turn itself into a cartoonish bad guy. The consequence of this is Trump, who is cruising towards nomination and, perhaps, the White House. Marco Rubio, perhaps the best of the rest among the Republicans, has warned Trump he should be aware ‘words have consequences’. But it’s too late. The latter’s campaign is based on the rules of the shock jock – create outrage and get on the front page. Meanwhile, the country of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher looks on, horrified. Advertisement