Taxis, and a growing anger

I have been without my car for the last 18 days now, for reasons that have to do with the general incompetence of auto garages here, coupled with Namibia’s position on the periphery of global markets, which makes shipping anything from outside the country a lengthy ordeal. But no more about that; reflecting on the [...]

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Reflections on Seeing a High School Photo, 14 Years Old

Getting drunk in foreign countries always seems to put me in a contemplative mood. Last night I had the pleasure of sharing the 19th anniversary of Namibia’s independence with a group of jovial Namibians in Katutura, the poor township whose name, roughly translated, means “We Will Not Move Anymore.” Savoring glass after glass of Windhoek [...]

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African Monopoly

Last weekend I found myself at El Cubano, a club in downtown Windhoek that capitalizes on nostalgia for failed revolutionaries. For the N$25 cover charge you can enter the club, be served by staff wearing Che Guevara t-shirts, and look at framed photos of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, Stokely Carmichael, and many more who are [...]

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Anti-Conquests in Africa

A second term I often use in what follows is “anti-conquest,” by which I refer to the strategies of representation whereby European bourgeois subjects seek to secure their innocence in the same moment as they assert European hegemony….The main protagonist of the anti-conquest is a figure I sometimes call the “seeing-man,” an admittedly unfriendly label [...]

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A Namibian Meal

Since I arrived in Windhoek about 7 weeks ago, my food consumption has mostly hewed to a pattern that is comforting to my Western palette. I have eaten steak, lamb, soup, pasta, chicken, and rice (all store-bought) when I have cooked for myself, and when I eaten out I have never ventured further than the [...]

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Paving the roads, Purging the hibernators

“For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white.” Half a century ago, Frantz Fanon thus forecast the principal danger of African independence. He saw then what we all now know: that African elites would exploit the advantages of political power for their own personal gain, moving into the same neighborhoods [...]

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George and the Emerging Middle Class

This past weekend I visited Swakopmund, located on the Atlantic coast, about four hours’ drive west of Windhoek. The town was founded by German settlers over 100 years ago, and some of the old churches and taverns from Namibia’s first colonial period still stand a few blocks from the shoreline. My friend Sarah and I [...]

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