When victims become killers and liberators become perpetrators
There is a moment in every nation’s life when it must look in the mirror and ask a simple question: who have we become?
Lazarus Kwedhi
There is a moment in every nation’s life when it must look in the mirror and ask a simple question: who have we become?
South Africa is at that moment, and Namibia watches, because our histories are braided together by African nativism, colonialism, liberation, and now by the same dangerous test: what do we do with the power we fought for during the liberation struggle for independence against colonialism and apartheid?
Mahmood Mamdani, the scholar who dissected the Rwandan genocide, gave us the warning long ago. He showed how African native societies that once bled under colonial oppression can, once they hold power, turn their pain and anger sideways, not at the systems that failed them, as was the case with European settler colonialism and apartheid rule, but at the neighbour and the foreigner, the ones who have no power to answer back. That is what is happening now. And it is not just violence; it is betrayal.
Ubuntu, the African way of life
At the core of this betrayal is the abandonment of Ubuntu. Ubuntu is not just a word. It is the African way of life “I am because we are.” It means your humanity is bound to mine.
