Sunday also marked another less grim anniversary: Twenty years ago Namibia gained its independence. At Pambazuka Henning Melber looks back on the last two decades and tries to figure out what it all has meant. Emphasizing social and economic inequality, Melber’s assessment is somber, perhaps excessively so. My own take is that while Melber is absolutely right in targeting such inequality as a glaring problem, we also need to keep in mind the decade that Namibia experienced in the 1980s, with South African troops and security forces wreaking havoc and South-West Africa as an Apartheid state. There is no harm in assessing what needs to be done as long as we recognize how far Namibia has come as a relative success story in Africa.
