MURDER!

So we have another horrific murder, pieces of woman’s body turning up in the dustbins of picnic stops along the main B1 road traversing the country, with supplementary disgusting detail, like the body parts seeming to have been stored in a fridge or freezer before being dumped.

But even more depressing, if possible, is the nebula of knee-jerk reaction, verbal detritus and media sensationalism surrounding it.

This is wearily familiar and predictable : very soon there will be a fourth rate politician calling for the reintroduction of the death penalty, which in turn “sparks a debate” in the media. A hell-fire preacher will “reveal” that the murders are God’s punishment for the debauchery of society (and for failing to pay church dues on time). Someone, as in the cretinous ramblings of “Concerned Namibian” in last week’s letters to the Editor, will alight on the true cause – criminal illegal foreigners. Hence, clamp down on immigration. The “I’m not xenophobic, but…” school of thought.

The police’s lack of resources will be blamed. Even if the police had hundreds of helicopters, there would still be murders.

Violence on TV will be blamed, Long before there even was TV, thee were murders.

Worst of all are the screeching spreads and sloppy logic of press coverage. A front page spread from Google Earth (!) showing the road from Rehoboth to Okahandja, which of course takes in the entire area of Windhoek, indicating the discovery of four bodies for the last three years, conveys the breathless announcement that the possibility of links between the murders “cannot be ruled out”. Well, the possibility that my great-grandmother was a Martian cannot be ruled out either (I never knew her). Whether the unsolved ‘B1’ killings of the past couple of years are connected is a matter for sober investigation, not for “Jack the Ripper” type hysteria.

The bit about bodies in the freezer also seems highly speculative. It's the middle of winter, with temperatures dropping near zero in the Windhoek area, so that body parts found outdoors early in the morning will be 'chilled'.

“B1 Butcher” scream the headlines, from a subber who has discovered the power of alliteration. A leading article declared “we are at war”, an absurd non-sequitur, reminiscent of course of the fake “war on terror”.

Likewise the lurid press cartoons of ghouls, demons and bizarre biblical devils, with the greatest respect to the cartoonist, are not helpful. I say this because, as likely as not, the murderer(s), when caught, will look not like a demon but more like the shy quiet little shopkeeper from across the road. I am of course casting no aspersions on shopkeepers. The biggest mass killer in history in the UK was a family doctor. “The banality of evil” as somebody expressed it.

Then there is the effort by that journalistic abortion which amazingly is still Namibia’s only weekend publication. It splashes in disgusting detail every photograph from every angle of every body part, under no other pretext but sheer blood lust. Where does it get this material? Is there a corrupt relationship between this paper and police forensic or pathology units?

The media vultures swarm round this event, but what about the “normal” murders? What about the women killed in the “comfort” of their own homes, and other Saturday night victims? They may not be dismembered in rubbish bins, but they are still just as dead. Their passing hardly rates an inside two-liner in the weekly crime round up.

We need to put a couple of sometimes-subconscious assumptions straight. First, that such barbaric incidents occur only in ‘backward’ countries or regions, and among the lower, illiterate, lawless ‘classes’. A recollection of the cases of Lord Lucan, O.J. Simpson, Charles Manson and currently Phil Spector make this fallacy very clear. Secondly that they are caused by rampant ‘evil’ in society. This is meaningless, anyway. No, such things can occur anywhere, in any social environment.

I am no psychologist, and the analysis of the reasons for these attacks on womena and children is hugely complex. It seems that they must have to do with the erosion of traditional male prestige and authority, frustration, sexual and otherwise. There is innate violence in human character. Give anyone untrammelled power over his community or neighbours, and he will start to behave like a Nazi.

There is the perverse urge to draw attention to oneself. He who disposes of body parts in picnic dustbins is not so much trying to dispose of them but to draw attention to them and himself. There is a grim distinction between random, alcohol-fuelled murders and those planned to the extent of reserving freezer space for the victims (if this is what happened).

Not that any of these are an excuse or justification for violence, and killers need to be found, prosecuted and removed from society by the full force of the law. But these horrors need to be confronted with more rationality, and fewer clichés.

I see the Anti-Corruption Commission,


long derided as a toothless tiger, is at last swinging into action. First they moved into shiny new offices. Then they arrested the chief accountant of the national assembly, and now they are going to go around the country arresting all the other Chief Accountants, which is a good starting point. But why stop there? Once the momentum is going, they should slap the ‘cuffs on every corrupt official and member of government they can find. Many would applaud these measures, but there are two problems:

a) We would have no Government left
b) Where would we keep all the arrested officials?

Let me deal with the second point first. Obviously there is no space in Namibian jails for all the corrupt officials, but we could ask the US if we could borrow their secret prisons in Romania and Poland, and there might be still some room in Guantanamo. This would have the added advantage that the corrupt suspects would simply disappear for ever, and we would not have the bother of trying them.

If we have no Government left, we would be in a similar state to Somalia which has had no government for 15 years, but we might do it better, since we do not have the trouble caused by Islamists and clan factions etc., and we have a bigger tourist industry than Somalia. Provided we can avoid being invaded by Ethiopia or the US, we might achieve the ultimate in what some political theorists advocate – small government, in fact a government so small it has vanished.

Of course, the members of the ACC would still be around, so they would become the de facto government. Maybe that is what they are working towards – their ‘hidden agenda’.

STOP THE PRESS and cancel the above! On today's news we hear that the top brass of the ACC are under investigation for accepting unentitled salary bonuses....we might have guessed.

The war veterans

are protesting and marching again.


They are camping outside parliament, getting tear-gassed and causing great embarrassment to the powers that be.

Will this issue never go away? Actually no, because it is part of a human condition which has been going on for centuries. It boils down to the fact that war veterans are usually a minority; wars and the reasons for them, especially foreign wars not fought on home territory, are soon forgotten; not even understood by the younger generation: and most importantly, dead soldiers have no votes.

It is sobering to remember that up until the Napoleonic wars two centuries ago, even so-called civilised countries did not honour their war dead. In fact, their bodies were abandoned where they fell, left for the locals to clear up, or even sold for fertiliser. Not until the founding of the Red Cross by Henry Dunant, and the political lobbying of Florence Nightingale, both appalled by the fate of soldiers sent to fight in far-off lands, was any awareness raised of the possible obligations of countries to those hailed as heroes but quickly buried (literally) when the glorious war did not turn out quite as well as expected.

In the First World War, millions died under atrocious conditions, and the survivors were promised (by the British) a land “fit for heroes to live in”. Didn’t quite work out that way. In the US today, seas of red white and blue patriotic fervour celebrate and god-speed their brave forces on their way to Iraq. When the coffins draped in similar colours return home, coverage on TV of the event is forbidden. Messages of sympathy to families are written by computer. Funerals of victims are low profile. Relatives are not encouraged to run to the media. Failure is embarrassing. And how does President Bush help to finance the ongoing war? Of course, by slashing funding to veterans’ programmes, both of the current war and previous ones. Veterans don’t have that many votes: certainly not as many as the Jewish or Cuban exile lobby in the US.

So those who fought for the liberation of Namibia were indeed heroes, but once freedom has been achieved, don’t expect too much gratitude from the newly installed government. Or at most, gratitude will consist largely of platitude. The new government are busy with better things to do, like lining their own pockets. The veterans have done their job, so they should do the decent thing and vanish from the political scene. (Don’t even think you are going to get to Heroes’ Acre – that is for the well-connected boys). We should achieve closure, and move on, as the clichés have it.

The moral of the story is that we should think carefully before politicians whip up a patriotic frenzy: that we must save our country by sending our sons to the glorious war on (tick which does not apply): Terrorism, Communism, Colonialism, Capitalism. There are just wars, wars worth fighting, and the Namibian war of independence was surely one. But they are not as many as the wars engineered with manufactured crises, fought on false premises, against fabricated enemies, for profiteers to make fortunes, and vain politicians to try to look like great statesmen. Wars are exciting: good for media viewership, and votes. But their veterans are boring, yesterday’s news.

So there you have it. There is of course money for those protesting veterans. Replacing the solid gold taps in the new State House with mere gold-plated ones should fund a comfortable improvement in their pensions. Though unfortunately that would be out of the question. We are grateful for those who sacrificed, of course. But please, when we are on our way in shiny new SUV’s to smart cocktail parties, don’t confront us with your rags and amputated stumps. It really is embarrassing.

Cuban doctors

in the spotlight again

According to the IHateCastro blogger, who may be a little biased:

Cuban Doctors are slaves for the Cuban State..."In any case, the truly humiliated and offended people are the Cuban doctors, those 65,000 fine professionals -- generally devoted and selfless -- who usually work and live under miserable conditions in Cuba. They are the comandante's favorite slaves: He rents them out, sells them, gives them away, lends them, exchanges them for oil or uses them as an alibi to justify his dictatorship."

Well anyway, the issue of the Cuban doctors in Namibia is that some of them have limited enthusiasm for returning to Cuba (the Cuban government know that, which is why their passports are confiscated by the Embassy while the doctors are working in Namibia, and only given back to them on boarding the plane home!). To overcome this, they have obtained US-produced international travel documents; which allow them to leave whatever country they happen to be in, and enter the United States. The US embassy of course is more than delighted to issue these documents to the Cuban medicos.

The next step is easy to guess - the Namibian government, independent in most respects except that in dealings with Cuba, it behaves as an abject and subservient colony - refuses to recognise these travel documents, so that the Cuban doctors are trapped and apparently have gone into hiding.

The over-riding factor is that no-one in the Namibian administration will ever breathe a word in criticism of Cuba (did they pay that important a part in the liberation struggle, or why do we owe them an uncapped obligation?)

But it's a no-win situation for Namibia. If the government bows to the norms of human rights and international law, it accepts the legality of the documents and lets the doctors leave to whatever destination they want. But if they do that, they upset Dr. Castro (or whichever nepotistic sidekick is now running the country) and Cuba will send no more doctors. Since no indigenous or White doctors will go to work in the rural areas, because the salary will not keep them in the golf clubs and Range Rovers to which they are accustomed, most people in the rural areas will die. So we have to have the Cuban doctors. So...

The Namibia Tourism Expo

has just come to an end.


Held at the historic (we mustn’t say tatty) Windhoek showgrounds, it is an impressive testimony to the growth of the tourism industry in the last few years.

There was also an attached motor show, but with the famed laid-back attitude of the Namibian motor industry to customer service, most of the stands were deserted. A friend of mine had an interest in a N$ 900 000 Range Rover, but could not find a salesman to talk to.

But back to tourism. In formerly empty landscapes, luxury lapas, lodges and tented camps have sprung up. (It’s always amusing to think how foreign visitors are prepared to pay twice as much to sleep in a tent as in a proper room). Roads that once stretched deserted to the horizon are now obscured by dust cloud trails from packed 4x4 conveys, rushing equally packed Italianos from one end of the country to the other for their photo-ops.

The country’s unspoilt and undiscovered areas are becoming more and more discovered (maybe not yet spoilt) and the wildlife attractions have been exploited to the hilt. Every self-respecting member of what is irritatingly known as the ‘big 5’, plus nearly every other photogenic animal has been game-driven past, innumerable times.

I wonder if the game animals know what a heavy responsibility rests on their sturdy shoulders. Does that lion know that hundreds of human jobs depend on him? Is each eland aware that he personally is responsible for 0.05% of annual national tourism revenue? Does each zebra realise that it is his task to provide each German visitor with a unique game viewing experience?

I’m not so much into animals – I earnestly support their preservation of course, but to me, once you’ve seen one damara dik-dik, you’ve seen them all. But tourists can never get enough, bless them.

And the luxury lodges. So many of them – the catalogue is a centimetre thick, and soon, like the phone book, you won’t be able to list them all in one volume. You would think that the country must be becoming seriously over-lodged, but apparently not: there is enough business for all of them. Is it necessary to sample at least most of them to gain a complete picture of Namibian hospitality? Actually no, because they are very much alike. The vast majority have tasteful stone-built walls, high thatched ceilings, dark-wood four-posters and a remarkably consistent décor.

Then there is the food. Just as geneticists can show that all the variations in the modern human genome stem from a single source – a common ancestor, not of course to be confused with the creationist’s Adam and Eve, it can be shown that all lodge chefs ultimately derive their training from one single exponent of tourist ur-cuisine. The evidence for this is that, wherever you stay, lodge food is identical with only small variations. For instance, for dinner the starter is always either butternut soup or smoked game salad (sometimes ‘carpaccio’, depending on the tariff level of the lodge). Main course is oryx steak (or ‘roulade’, again, depending on the price range) and the pudding is chocolate mousse or lemon meringue slice.

Not that this affects ordinary Namibians - they would have to take out a second mortgage to stay at such establishments.

I do hope then, that tourists visiting Namibia for four weeks or more don’t develop indigestion. But they love it and keep on coming. Just so long as we keep growing those butternuts, and the lions and elands keep pulling their weight.