A gleam of Light

The African-American Civil Rights activist, WEB Du Bois, once remarked: “I believe in pride of race and lineage and self so deep as to scorn injustice to other selves.”

Using the same analogy, one could say that being proud of one’s ethnic culture does not necessarily contradict one’s pride as a Namibian. My ethnicity should serve as a cultural bearing that enables me to embrace other “cultural selves”.

Article 19 of the Namibian Constitution is explicit in stating that: “Every person shall be entitled to enjoy, practice, profess, maintain and promote any culture… subject to the terms of this Constitution and further subject to the condition that the rights protected by this article do not impinge upon the rights of others or the national interest.”

This is what sociologists would call “cultural unity in diversity.” In the simplest of terms, this means that there is nothing wrong with my being proud of my cultural roots provided that that does not negatively impinge upon national interest or the cultural spaces of other ethnic and/or racial groups.

Given our painful colonial past where racial and ethnic divisions were promoted through the apartheid policy of divide and rule, we always tend to talk about racial and ethnic issues in whispers. I think that is not helpful at all because we behave like a cancer patient who lives in denial. I always argue that the Namibian national identity is still a very elusive project. We need all hands on deck to construct this project.

National unity in diversity is my pet project and every time I meet a group of strangers I would always ask them penetrating questions to learn more about their cultural backgrounds. One of my favourite “hunting grounds” for my pet project is the Olympia Swimming Pool, where one can meet young people from diverse cultural backgrounds.

On 7 December 2022, I went for a swim at the Olympia Swimming Pool. As I was doing my laps up and down the pool, a group of about 10 young people drew my attention. They were playing games in the water and were quite noisy.

What particularly drew my attention to this group of young people was the fact that they seemed to be from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. Being a clinical observer that I am, I realised that there was no pretence in these kids in terms of relating to each other. They were talking and joking freely with each other without blinking an eye and the heavens did not fall. There was no trace of racial or ethnic bias in dealing with each other and they seemed to be totally oblivious to their racial and ethnic differences. They were just grade nine classmates who were having fun with their two teachers.

When I got out of the pool I introduced myself to their teacher, whose name was Florian, and told him that I was impressed by the diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds that I was seeing in the group.

As the conversation was unfolding, I discovered that the name of the school was Waldorf. As I started to talk to the learners, I discovered that there were about three Damaras, three Aawambo, one Omuherero, two Germans, one English, someone who was half German and half Afrikaans, someone from the Zambezi region and someone born to a Zambian mother and a Mexican father. The surprise of the package were three kids who I assumed to be either Coloured or Basters. Upon further enquiry, I discovered that of the three, one was born to a Damara mother and a Baster father and the other two were born to Aawambo mothers and German fathers. One of the kids was mute but I did not see him being mocked or discriminated against because of that challenge. He was just one of them.

Shortly before my swimming pool encounter, I had met a man from the Zambezi region who must be in his fifties. Sensing that his profile would fit well in the piece I was planning to write, I asked him politely whether I could use his name in my piece, but he declined my request because he did not want his identity to be revealed. I have decided to respect his privacy and will therefore refer to him as Simasiku in this piece.

As he started to open up to me, he told me that he had been born and grown up in the Nyango refugee camp in western Zambia, which was run by Swapo; and which was to many of us a second home, away from home. He further told me that he had only come to learn how to speak his mother tongue, Sifwe, after independence in 1990.

Growing up in Nyango, the only African language that he knew was Oshikwanyama, which was the lingua franca in Swapo camps. He said that in his childlike naivety, he had assumed that all black Namibians