This column is so titled and headline this week questioningly. This is partly in tribute to the Namibian freedom fighter, Gerson Hitjevi Veii, who was put to rest at Heroes’ Acre on Wednesday. And also as a follow up to last week’s focus on the same subject, racism and reconciliation, 25 years after Namibian independence when many would have thought that the Apartheid hatchet of racism was being buried. Indeed as it seems, 25 years after, it has not been buried as is it supposedly must have been.
In tribute to the late Veii because the same week in which he honourably bowed his head out of this world, and in particular his beloved Land of the Brave, the land love thereof which imbued him with his nationalist and patriotic spirit, he consequently gallantly sacrificing his energy, wisdom and selflessness, and ultimately paying the highest price, his life, with his departure on Saturday 14, February. Because consequently his frailty in his later life has been a direct cause of an illness induced by the harsh conditions of his detention on Robben Island in the mid-1960s, until the early 1970s when he was released. But what caught my attention the week of his departure when tributes were pouring in from different quarters for this liberation icon, was a sound bite from the Omurari wOndjivisiro Ombaranga (Namibian Broadcasting Corporation Otjiherero Language Service) of him expressing self on the state of reconciliation in Namibia, questioning why only blacks, or Africans if you like, are the ones seeming to have embraced reconciliation, without any semblance of reciprocity by their fellow whites? He contrasted reconciliation in Namibia with that in South Africa where, to him, whites seem to have embraced reconciliation. To him this is because in South Africa, one of their leaders, former Apartheid President, and an independent South Africa Co-President, Frederick W. De Klerk, had publicly apologised for the wrongs of Apartheid, and in turn blacks seem to have accepted this, thus South Africa seeming to be moving on. Whites in South Africa have accepted that they had done blacks wrong and an injustice and have publicly apologised.
In Namibia, this has not been the case, meaning that whites have not come to terms with their connivance, if not outright perpetration of heinous racist crimes against their fellow blacks countrymen. In this regard whites in Namibia, according to Veii, have not come to terms with the wrongness and unjustness of racism, thus to them, to this day, it is business as usual. Many may see this stance by the late Veii as far from any truism. Including until recently with some kind of reawakening this columnist. Believing that the state of race relations in Namibia, especially between blacks and whites, is different and apposite from the supposed truism of one my fellow black consciousness ideologue, late Veii. This was until the truism of the just departed Veii was graphically visited upon me a few hours after listening to the late Veii’s sound bites. Through my contacts I was allowed and walloped a peeping window into the detestable, abominable, outrageous and archaic race relations in one of the local financial institutions. Long known to have been a financial laager of the whites, of the Boers to be precise and blunt, without any pretence at neighbourliness, sisterhood or reconciliation. And neither opening up to blacks, both as clients and employees, with this financial institution instead further retreating in its laager.
Black employees have been finding their treatment in this institution something out of this world, and a daylight nightmare, disproportionate to the ancient epochs of slavery, where the master was the master and the slave a slave. Rather than considering their black counterparts fellow co-workers on par with them, to the white staffers, the blacks in this institution are more slaves than fellow employees. And fellow white staffers the slave drivers in the true fashion of enslavement. Every day of their working day blacks are made to feel they do not belong in this bank, and likewise clients are made to feel the same that this is a bank that belongs to only the Boers themselves, and if anybody else the unsuspecting moneyed blacks. The moneyed blacks, one understands, because of the undignified treatment meted to them by those who are supposed to serve them, have only been using the bank as stepping stone for getting loans, the bank itself having been eager to grant them such loans to placate its deep-rooted racism. As soon as obtaining the requisite loans, faced with such blatant racism, the black clients have understandably been moving on. Good for them as they have the choice to move on, but what about the victimised black employees caught in this vicious web of white racism where as white top-heavy this bank has been and is, they cannot expect justice. If a black dare insists on her/his rights, the immediate destiny is to be shown the door, with no recourse to any justice within this institution.
This is not to say there are no black members on the board of directors of this bank, but it seems the wailing of the black employees have only been ending on empty promises at best and at worse on death ears.