Memories of Namibia, Vol. 1

The first installment of a continuing series.

I am scheduled to meet a Russian-born Canadian graduate student in downtown Windhoek on a clear Saturday in mid-March. The city, as it always is on weekends, is eerily quiet, abandoned. I wait in front of the post office on Independence Avenue, directly across the street from Post Street Mall.

She arrives. We start to walk towards a restaurant where we will eat a late lunch. A new arrival to Namibia, she starts asking me questions about the names of the streets. “Why is there a street named after Fidel Castro?” she asks. I give what is probably an overly long answer on the complicated history of Namibia’s movement toward independence. She seems disinterested.

“The contrast of street signs here is so weird,” she finally says. “Earlier today I was standing on the corner of Robert Mugabe and Nelson Mandela avenues. It was like I had one foot in heaven and the other in hell. One is an angel, the other is a devil.”

When she says this I think to myself: “Such ideas are exactly why the West keeps fucking Africa up.” But I say nothing.