“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 as their colonial predecessors, sending their children to the same schools, and generally adopting the same cultural styles and mores as the white men who had ruled the continent for most of the twentieth century. This condition would create a profound cultural, political, and economic schism between the urban metropole and the rural village; while the former would become, with luck, increasingly developed along Western lines, the latter would sink further into a state of deep underdevelopment, marked by disease, decay, and economic exploitation. Of course, Fanon’s answer for this problem, as with all things, was violence: a violence that would allow for the endless recreation of man, thus freeing him from the colonial psychosis that had been his birthright.
Nearly fifty years after Fanon’s death, most, if not all, of sub-Saharan Africa has managed to capture the worst of these possibilities. While the urban/rural divide has grown in country after country, the ruling parties have strategically deployed violence and repression to maintain their hold on power. Rather than the radical violence envisioned by Fanon, the violence of neo-colonialism is essentially conservative and reactionary in nature. In this respect, Namibia is no exception. While the country has largely avoided the kind of endemic violence that plagues other countries in the region, freedom of speech and association are under a direct frontal assault from Swapo, the ruling party since the country gained independence in 1990. Recent weeks have seen violent attacks in the North on supporters of RDP, the recently-formed opposition party. Swapo party members have been obliged to take loyalty oaths in order to ensure their good standing, and numerous government administrators, regional officials, and local councillors have been purged from the party’s ranks by the Politburo, suspected of being RDP “hibernators” (the term is Swapo’s) waiting for an opportunity to jump over to the RDP side. Last week the mayor of Windhoek and three city councillors were axed. And just this week, the government has shut down one of the country’s most popular radio call-in programmes, due to “abuses” by callers who used the show as a forum for criticizing the government and its leaders.
The creation of the RDP, a party which seems to have no substantial policy differences from Swapo, has brought out the ruling party’s most irrational instincts, revealing its fundamental insecurities. Thirty-three years after the United Nations insanely declared SWAPO to be the “sole and authentic representative of the Namibian people,” today’s party is seeing that designation challenged more fully than ever before, in the process revealing the profound weakness of the country’s fairly progressive constitution, which seems to be ignored whenever it most suits the country’s ruling clique.
Political tensions thus flare in the North, where more than half the country’s population lives. In the capital, however, calm and indifference prevail. Many suggest that Swapo is, in fact, undeserving of the criticism it has received. “Things aren’t so bad here,” is a common refrain. Indeed, if Windhoek had more trains, one can imagine these people saying that, after all, the trains are running on time. And it is true, the roads are mostly well-paved, the infrastructure is good, the amenities more than adequate. Why upset the ship of state? What, after all, does RDP want, other than to replace Swapo and collect the largesse of government for itself?
These criticisms are all certainly valid. To date RDP has not brought forth a programme worthy of a serious airing. But this does not mean that Swapo should be let off the hook. Moreover, the blithe indifference to these political tussles, so evident in Windhoek, is simply further evidence of the profound urban/rural split that Fanon prophesied half a century ago.It is a split that Windhoek’s nice hotels, clean restaurants, and well-paved roads are specifically designed to obscure.
As detailed by this 2007 report by the United Nations Development Programme, Namibia has one of the largest disparities in income in the world. The statistics contained in the report illustrate this gap in many ways. But to give you a taste of the nature of this gap, the report notes that whites living in the capital enjoy a standard of living similar to that prevailing in Sweden or Canada. By contrast, the standard of living for blacks in the North is similar to that prevailing in the Sudan and the Congo. Per capita income for Namibia’s German-speaking residents is N$87,649. For English speakers, the figure is N$66,898. For Oshiwambo speakers, by contrast, the figure is N$7,218. Per capita income for Khoisan speakers is even worse, at N$3,263. A baby born today in the Ohangwena region in the North has a 57 percent chance of dying before the age of 40; for a baby born in the capital region, the figure is 27 percent (it would be much lower if one counted only the whites living in the capital). Since independence, these gaps have been growing rather than contracting.
Quite simply, those living in rural areas occupy a very different world, and suffer a much harder existence, than those living in the city centre. Indeed, they occupy two different worlds, a reality reflected by the allocation of government funds, although not in the way one would hope. According to the report, spending in the capital region is twice what it should be based on the area’s human development index, whereas spending on the North is half what it should be. This, quite simply, is a replication, a continuation, of the colonial landscape that many died fighting.
It is also, of course, unsurprising. Similar disparities (or even worse, depending on the country) prevail in virtually every country in sub-Saharan Africa. What is depressing, then, at least for me, is that the weapon of violence and repression, of political purges and censorship, is being used not to advance a radical programme of the redistribution of wealth that is so desperately needed. One could, after all, get behind a good programme of political repression if its purpose was to weed out the counter-revolutionaries and engage the country in a bold new direction. Rather, these tools are being narrowly used to protect the slim patronage of a privileged elite. The latest purgings are the equivalent of firing a subordinate because he roots for the wrong football team. In Namibia, the operative question is not “What do you believe?” but rather “To which tribe do you belong?”
