Don’t Laugh, It’s Namibia

Whoever said that laughter is the best medicine clearly never tried to crack a joke in Namibia without being tackled by a crowd armed with Facebook, X statuses and Biblical verses.

“How dare you laugh when people are suffering?” they’ll say, as if humour was the one thing clogging our national development pipeline.

But seriously, don’t laugh.

This country is no place for satire.

Everything here is far too sacred, far too serious. Satire in Namibia is like trying to dance the pantsula through a veld fire.

You’ll look stupid, get burned, and still be blamed for the drought.

Let’s test the theory. What do you satirise in a country where every headline sounds like it was written by a drunken Stephen King with a grudge on a third-world country?

Rape, murder, corruption, stolen billions, schoolkids collapsing from hunger, pensioners dying while queueing for what’s apparently rightfully theirs.

Not even Trevor Noah would touch some of our stories without whispering “thoughts and prayers” after each punchline.

Take the horrific killings of young girls at Okahandja. I dare you to go on and find the humour in it. We’ll wait. I tried. I stared at the news like it was a joke waiting to be decoded.

Spoiler alert: It’s not.

There’s no punchline in a body bag.

Same goes for the almost weekly bloodbath on the B2 road.

There’s nothing funny about the stretch between Okahandja and Karibib, unless you consider it hilarious that it’s slowly becoming Namibia’s most reliable form of population control.

We can’t fix the roads, but by God, we’ll pave the way to the afterlife.

You dare not point out how cars get to kiss each other head-on on an open dual-lane highway. That would be rude and insensitive.

Better to blame witchcraft, the fog at Wilhelmstal, or Swapo.

Do not point out that roads don’t kill people, people kill people. Preferably innocent and poor ones, on their way to job interviews or back from funerals. But don’t mention that. You’ll be accused of politicising tragedy.

And let’s not even try to be cheeky about the ongoing soap opera involving Mac Hengari.

A man allegedly blackmailed, extorted and quite possibly caught in something darker.

But hey, nothing spices up state communication like a side serving of scandal. What’s the tagline now?

“DNA test results are not out, but it’s not his child”.

Straight from the source, unless that source refutes it.

No. Let us not joke about the rape of young girls, but skip that careful smile at how they went on for years in a rosy relationship.

Do you see now why there is nothing funny at all in this country?

Be serious. Always serious. After all, the nation is mourning. Always mourning. There’s a new vigil every week, a new hashtag, a new GoFundMe to send someone to their final resting place because the state is too broke or too busy.

So we don’t laugh.

We hold our breath, tighten our belts (especially the youth, who’ve now belted so hard they’ve turned blue), and wait for some out-of-this-world miracle that was probably eaten by an entrepreneur before it reached the hospital.

Yet, somehow, there’s still humour. Unintentional, dark, deeply Namibian humour. The dilemma lies in that good humour deserves a laugh, but what do we do with dark and serious when we can’t laugh?

Like the state-of-the-art police van that broke down during a chase, but miraculously had Wi-Fi, because the officers went live to complain about fuel shortages.

Or the minister who launched a campaign against corruption with a banner printed by a company owned by his cousin. Or the millionaire pastor who held a healing crusade and forgot to pray for the country’s economy.

Do you see how I had to make those stories up because real stories in Namibia just refuse to be funny?

And who can forget the ‘war’ on journalists and social media influencers, a battle fought with the same energy we should have been using to fight gender-based violence.

But priorities, right?

So, no, I won’t write satire about our little ones un-alived by heartless thugs I wish to see hanging by the neck at Parliament Gardens.

I will not write about the rapes. That’s not satire. That’s mourning dressed in sarcasm. But I will write satire about the system that creates space for these tragedies and then goes on holiday.

Because you see, the trick isn’t to laugh at the pain. It’s to laugh in defiance of it.

To laugh because they said we shouldn’t.

To laugh because the only other option is to cry, and our tear glands are as dry as the desert in September.

To laugh because maybe, just maybe, someone will finally realise that satire isn’t a luxury. In Namibia, it’s survival.

So next time someone says “don’t joke about that”, ask them when was the last time not joking fixed anything.

Then smile.

The country might be on fire, but at least we’ve still got jokes, even though I could not even punch any into this page this time.

In an age of information overload, Sunrise is The Namibian’s morning briefing, delivered at 6h00 from Monday to Friday. It offers a curated rundown of the most important stories from the past 24 hours – occasionally with a light, witty touch. It’s an essential way to stay informed. Subscribe and join our newsletter community.