In Namibia, being white sucks

In Namibia, being white sucks

As a white foreign academic I know myself to be on the endangered species list. What however makes my situation one of being ‘’critically endangered'" is that I write articles  that are sometimes construed as critical of government policies If you comment on government policy you really cannot expect to be loved unless of course you are a professional praise singer. The fact that I am still here and still alive, for the moment, is one of the very best things about Namibia. In so many of  Namibia’s neighboring countries, even those that are democracies such as Botswana,  if you write with critical policy articles then the River Styx awaits you or at best a one way ticket to another country if you are not a national. Consider it something of a cliché but Namibia remains the home of the free … and yes you still have to be a bit brave!

But (and nothing has meaning before the word ‘but’) I must confess that to be white in Namibia is one of the more difficult parts of my life. Color has never meant much to me personally and I have always taken people for what they are inside their heads and their hearts. Nothing else should ever really matter. Yet as a relative newcomer to Africa after 12 years I have found color to matter in Namibia much more than it ever should, almost 30 years after decolonisation and  independence. Of course anyone who knows Namibia’s tragic history would not be surprised.

In my life I have been hated for many things, my politics, my country of birth, my religion but color never rated high in the great sources of hatred until I crossed from Botswana to Namibia. In Botswana I was of course aware of color but it was not like Namibia. In Botswana there was no apartheid and the country was at the time too wretchedly poor a country to even be colonized by the British so racial and ethnic relations were always more comfortable than here.

In Namibia to be a white foreigner is uncomfortable, of course not half as uncomfortable as being black Namibian and having no choice but to live in ‘kambashu’ in Katatura. Oft times the racial tensions which exist in Namibia invades my personal life. Recently I went to a restaurant near UNAM which shall remain nameless to protect the guilty. My Namibian friend who accompanied me hates the place because it is one of those restaurants in Namibia that remains ‘for whites only’ even though the signs are long gone. You will almost never see a black person there, unless they are waiters or unless they are so used the abuse that it no longer matters. Most black Namibians know which places these are and where not to go. But I like the food there and so I insisted. I was really pleased to see a large group on UNAM students sitting there enjoying a substantial  dinner and writing notes of some sort. Maybe there is progress, I naively hoped.

At the end of their dinner the owner/manager of the restaurant came and told the students that they should not be writing notes and said ‘where do you think you are, in a shebeen in Katutura’.  I lost my temper, which rarely happens these days, and got up and started screaming at the top of my voice that these students had done nothing wrong and that this is a free Namibia and that if I heard this sort of racist dribble again I would report the man to the police. He disappeared to the kitchen. I promised the staff that I would never step foot in the restaurant again and left.

I have also been a victim of the discrimination against whites. One petty episode involved a taxi driver at UNAM who last year wanted to charge me $20 for going to the other end of town when I knew that at the time the price was $10. I told him as such and he replied’ You colonized my country’ Being of Polish origin it struck me that the last imperialist ambitions of the 14^th century Polish empire ended at the Ukrainian steppes and those Polish aristocrats probably never even knew where Africa was. Angry at so blatant an attempt an attempt to rob me I turned around to the driver and said ‘I hate you, not because you are black, but because you use your color as an excuse to cheat people’ and then proceeded to hitch-hike to town.

For me personally this racism pervades much of my life in Namibia. I am a physically large man, from a family of large copper miners and textile workers and hence I have the natural physical appearance of a white man that many unfortunately associate with such racist views.  As a result two things happen. Black Namibians immediately assume because of my appearance that I am just another white racist and don’t want to speak to me and some, but not all, white Namibians feel at complete liberty to express racist views. This simply put, in the language of the younger generation, sucks, and leaves me personally isolated as I naturally avoid people with racist views and so I simply have learned to avoid people altogether in Namibia.

Recently I had an experience with a white contractor that is also worth the recalling. He shared my views, and that held by many Namibians, black or white, about the sad mismanagement of the country’s economy. I knew where the conversation was going as he amplified his views about ‘African mismanagement’. I cut him off   and said that ‘I am very old now, which makes me neither smart nor wise, but I have heard what you are about to say,  said many years ago about the Chinese and Indians. They also screwed up their economies for a very long time with really bad policies , just like we are doing now, but over time they have found their own road to prosperity and are winning. It will take time, and I don’t know how long it will take or whether I will live to see it,  but Namibia and Africa more generally will also find their own roads.’The road for Namibia will be shorter when we finally are able to bury the racism that is the ugliest aspects of Namibia’s past and present.

These are the views of Professor Roman Grynberg and not necessarily those of UNAM where he is employed.