Thoughts on Geingob's fear for tribalism and regionalism (Part 1)

LAZARUS KAIRABEB, SECRETARY GENERAL OF THE NAMA TRADITIONAL LEADERS ASSOCIATION WRITES:

The ceaseless warnings by Dr. Hage Gottfried Geingob – President of Namibia – against tribalism and regionalism, which according to him is a cause for concern in this country gives the impression that something in the socio-political ordainment has become dysfunctional. Or so it seems.

His utterances, these days more than ever before, attract immense attention, not only from locals but also international media groups, academics and politicians alike. We in the Nama Traditional Leaders Association, particularly our technical section dealing with genocide and other social matters are inundated with queries about the character of the Namibian nation-state and why tribalism should pose so much danger in an otherwise peaceful country?

This question in itself may sound simple but is in reality a vast enterprise. A search for some basic reasons why tribalism could be a cause for concern in this country invariably leads to points of view based on what ordinary people are saying and how politicians are reacting.

The President consistently has a view that politicians who were successful and content at a time, but are no longer successful, elect to use tribal tags to sow tribal divisions for their own self-interest. “Failed politicians” he calls “them”, whoever they are.

My own view is that his perception about the situation is a gross oversimplification of the problem. I think for him to think of tribalism devoid of ethnic constituencies in Africa is a serious omission.

Also, the reasons for behaviour in societies, more often than not, are triggered by the manner the socio-cultural structures exert pressure upon certain groups in the society to engage in non-conformist rather than conformist conduct. We can take, for example, the Herero and Nama Genocide – and the manner in which the Namibian and German governments react to the demands for restorative justice by these descendant communities of the victims.

In Namibia, and perhaps the whole of Africa, the terms tribe and ethnicity are used interchangeably because the assumption; borrowing from the writings of Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, is as follows:

"Every human being is a member of one particular tribe. Within that tribe, customs and traditions are established to guide, direct and control the beliefs, attitudes, and habits of its individual members. Failure to comply with the collective will is tantamount to an act of disloyalty which may be punishable with severe penalties. Obedience to the tribe is thus inculcated in the tribes-folk from childhood. From our studies in history we learn that many tribes which came into contact with each other had discovered a way of living conterminously. In some cases, they preserved their identity. In other cases, they amalgamated to produce an offspring, which evolved into a new prototype."

President Geingob in his own doctoral thesis on “State Formation in Namibia” emphasizes inclusivity as an attempt to get around, among many other things, socio-cultural conditions where “means-ends” discrepancy is likely to erode political gains. The degree, however, of his inclusivity is a subject for debate still to unfold. This means to say, whether inclusivity will indeed become a norm, and/or has occurred in fact or exist only in the imagination?

Dr. Geingob further argues that:

”(W)e need to acknowledge that ethnicity is a fact and is not going to go away.

"To say that the revival of nationalism is merely a self-deluding, irrational response to circumstance does not diminish the fact that it is a reality, and it is a dangerously misleading approach simply to demonize it. Demonizing ethnicity, for example, resulted in the massacre of the Jews, of the Tutsis, and of the Kurds.

"Recognizing the strengths of diversity on the other hand encourages a sense of inclusivity, and a desire to find means to resolve conflicts. Leaders of Africa fighting against colonialism recognized this fact. They sought to be inclusive under the umbrella of nationalism within the confines of the colonial state. However, in the postcolonial era, “striving to transform colonial territories into national territories, they would find Africa’s wealth of ethnic cultures both distracting and hard to absorb into their schemes. They would fall back into the colonial mentality of regarding it as ‘tribalism’, and, as such, retrogressive.”

"This failure to absorb ethnic diversity in the independent state’s scheme of things cannot itself be a justification for treating ethnic loyalties as retrogressive. More often than not, there are other factors that play on ethnicity. The glib use of the blanket term nationalism [read tribalism] obscures the range of factors – economic, historical, and social – that vary from case to case. Economic dislocation can make populations ripe for the kind of scaremongering, scapegoating and xenophobia that some leaders employ in a bid to gain political power. The challenge for Africa is therefore to contain the exploitation of ethnicity for re-traditionalizing the African societies by tribal politics.”

My contention about nationalism or ethnicity in Namibia is that: Ethnicity cum tribalism is a reality.

National unity can be a reality; but at present it is not quite a reality. What we observe, and perhaps need to interrogate further is that "what appeared to be national unity" was in fact an outcome of a movement mobilized and united chiefly by common dissent against a common enemy, which in itself was brought about by politicization and transformation of ethnic exclusivity into a major political cleavage, which was the liberation movement.