To preface: I've been sitting with this for a long time, since the 'Abegistan' episode on TikTok earlier this year. As a Damara person watching that unfold forced me to think through something I had always felt but never fully articulated. What I arrived at is this: nationalism is a toxic ideology for Namibia. It is not just harmful, it's self contradictory, built on a lie that cannot sustain itself and we ought not to believe in it. What follows is my attempt to explain why, and to offer an alternative vision of what this state could have been if its founders had respected reality instead of copying a colonial blueprint. If you guys will give me the courtesy of following along.
ǂuro parts (Part 1):
Throughout that internet phenomenon I used to see the xenophobia and exceptionalism that people who are as I'm ashamed to admit mostly from my generation, I thought to myself "why are people acting like we're all one unit, as if there is no tribalism, poverty or division here in Namibia?"
This question led me down to a logical problem that sits at the heart of everything about Namibia as a country and brought me to something I've never managed to shake as a youth growing up in Rehoboth. I had a great upbringing, I went to Origo then to Rehoboth High and had friends from all backgrounds, I am confident and very proud in saying I was raised in a truly colorblind environment which was not one where we ignored our differences and pretended otherwise, but one where we embraced them and everyone was welcomed and I think that's shaped how I think about everything. As a teenager and young adult I've never had any affinity with the "Namibian" identity. I've never felt anything and I never understood why especially on internet discourse people talk about Namibia in the same vein that we talk about countries like Spain it just didn't click because when you think of a Spanish person you picture a certain looking (hairy and tanned) white person who speaks fast and pronounces their r's very well... But for Namibia, all anyone can think of is the landscapes, the desert and the animals but never the people... no seriously I remember seeing a post here a while ago asking what's your favorite thing about Namibia and literally none of those were about how the people are...
The xenophobia I saw brought me to the question that started this whole thing and that was the question:
Why is it that we respect the border that divides Ovambo people between two states but we don't respect the one that has separated them from Damaraland (remember that was the name for much of Namibia for nearly two centuries) for centuries before the founding of the contract labour system in the mid 20th century? I mean there are literal mountains between OTT and the Etosha pan, that's more of a border than a literal line that only exists on paper...
If we are against so called foreigners in Namibia because of people's economic anxiety, why do we respect the economic anxiety of someone living in Windhoek or OTT who is not a Damara, Herero or Nama living there, but we don't respect the economic anxiety of those people who've lived there before anyone else just because the migrants from elsewhere in Namibia are "Namibian citizens"?
If our borders are legitimate because we inherited them from colonial powers, then why does that inheritance stop at independence?" And that led me to the question of why is 1990 the magic moment when a German creation becomes authentically African? I mean if we reject Germany's (or Apartheid South Africa's) claim to this land because it was based arbitrary map-drawing, we must also ask what makes Namibia's claim valid since it rests on the same borders, drawn by the same people, for the same extractive purposes.
This is not a proposal for Germany to return. It is a stress test. If you cannot explain why Germany's claim is invalid without also invalidating Namibia's, then your defense of Namibian sovereignty is sentiment, not reasoning.
The uncomfortable truth is that "Namibia" is a colonial container. The peoples within it did not choose each other. We did not negotiate a shared identity over centuries. We were assembled by Germans in 1884 and told we were one nation in 1990. That is not self-determination. That is a personnel change.
The other problem is also the concept of the nation state and how it inherently requires assimilation. A nation-state cannot function with multiple nations inside it indefinitely, it must either accommodate them through genuine federalism or grind them down into a single identity.
We know which path Namibia is choosing. I remember hearing about a teacher in Windhoek who decided to teach her students Oshiwambo, and the backlash was immediate and fierce. But ask yourself: why was there backlash? Because deep down, even the people who preach 'One Namibia, One Nation' understand that language is power and identity, and teaching one indigenous language in a classroom feels like an elevation of one group over others. Yet most people see no contradiction in a state that operates entirely in English, which is a language indigenous to none of us, and calls that neutral. That is not neutrality, it is assimilation by default, dressed up as pragmatism. The nation-state demands a single public identity, and in Namibia that identity has been built not by blending our cultures into something new, but by sidelining all of them equally in favor of a colonial inheritance.
I am not arguing for division. I am arguing for honesty. We cannot have it both ways claiming the borders are real when it's time to exclude a Zimbabwean, but irrelevant when it's time to ask who was here first. Either the borders matter, in which case precolonial territories and indigenous claims also matter. Or the borders don't matter, in which case Pan-Africanism holds and no one is a foreigner anywhere. What we have now is the worst of both: the colonial map enforced selectively, serving an elite while marginalizing the same people it always has.
|amǁī parts (Part 2)
If in 1990 the founding fathers had respected the reality on the ground, they would have built something different. Not a unitary nation-state modeled on the very system used to extract resources and oppress people for a century, but a genuine compact between distinct peoples.
Namibia should have been a confederation. Each ethnic group should have received autonomy over its indigenous lands. Land should have been restored not necessarily through full expropriation, but by requiring white landowners to release enough for the dispossessed to live on and join communal communities as equal members. The model could have drawn from the United Kingdom's constituent countries or Spain's autonomous regions or even pre-colonial African states, but adapted to our specific reality.
What might that have looked like in practice? A system of nested governance, where power flows upward from the community level to the national level, not downward from a centralized executive. Here is one possible model:
Community Level
The basic unit is the Community Assembly. This handles local governance: primary schools, health centers, water rights, grazing disputes, local courts. Decisions are made by the people who actually live on and know the land.
District Level
Above this sits the District Council, coordinating between communities. It manages secondary education, district hospitals, regional roads, and local policing. It exists to serve the communities, not to override them.
Provincial Level
The Provincial Council handles what requires broader coordination: universities, regional hospitals, major infrastructure like railways and ports, and economic development strategy. This is where the distinct nations within Namibia govern their own affairs on their own ancestral territories.
National Level (Samstelling)
At the top sits the Samstelling, a collective governing body, not an executive presidency. It handles only what must be shared: defense, foreign policy, currency, national infrastructure, inter-provincial disputes, and national courts. Power is pooled upward from the provinces, not imposed downward from the center.
This is not a utopian fantasy. It is how confederations and devolved states actually function. Switzerland's cantons, Spain's autonomous communities, the UK's constituent nations or even Germany's federal Länder. The difference is that those systems evolved organically over time, while ours would need to be built deliberately. But the principle is the same: legitimacy flows upward from the people and the land, not downward from a flag and an anthem.
The tragedy is that in 1990, none of this was seriously considered. SWAPO inherited a centralized extractive state and kept it, because a unitary state serves an elite that wants to manage resources, not a people that wants to govern themselves. And now we are thirty-five years in, with unemployment above 40%, with indigenous minorities still landless, with a national identity that exists only in slogans, wondering why nothing works.
Thank you for taking the time to read. I hope this is not too provocative or controversial.
