Kick-Starting The Rennaissance

PLEASE allow me to congratulate Alfredo Hengari and Martin Mwinga for their very courageous and incisive opinion pieces and for raising the level of public discourse in Namibia.

They both demonstrate that critique is an important element of progress, not fear or slavishness. Mwinga shows that economics is more than a technocratic computation of inputs and outputs, but rather a deeply political process that reflect the interests and ideological investments of dominant groups in society.He also takes the courageous first step towards unveiling alternative economic theory long advocated by African intellectual giants like Bade Onimode who have been marginalised by bourgeois economic theory taught at universities and embraced by the western consultants who constructed Namibia’s economic development plans shortly after independence.Mwinga challenges us to reclaim that marginalised knowledge as part of the process of setting Namibia on an alternative developmental path that will benefit the many and not just the few.Hengari’s article shows that Namibian historiography is an important arena for contestation and for competing accounts of certain moments in history.He raises the important question of how knowledge and power are co-implicated and how the “truth” depends on who says what and with what authority.Some in power who have constructed their own accounts of Namibian history and have therefore expunged people like Joseph Hendricks (also known as Axab) from it.Hengari challenges us to open the debate and recognise that the history we construct is not free from our political biases and interests.In order to get a balanced picture and to reach a plausible account of our past we must welcome contestation.There is nothing threatening about allowing “a thousand flowers to bloom”.On the contrary, ridding ourselves of the culture of fear, silence and slavishness, may just kick-start the much promised – but rather illusive – African Renaissance.Lucy Edwards WindhoekMwinga shows that economics is more than a technocratic computation of inputs and outputs, but rather a deeply political process that reflect the interests and ideological investments of dominant groups in society.He also takes the courageous first step towards unveiling alternative economic theory long advocated by African intellectual giants like Bade Onimode who have been marginalised by bourgeois economic theory taught at universities and embraced by the western consultants who constructed Namibia’s economic development plans shortly after independence.Mwinga challenges us to reclaim that marginalised knowledge as part of the process of setting Namibia on an alternative developmental path that will benefit the many and not just the few.Hengari’s article shows that Namibian historiography is an important arena for contestation and for competing accounts of certain moments in history.He raises the important question of how knowledge and power are co-implicated and how the “truth” depends on who says what and with what authority.Some in power who have constructed their own accounts of Namibian history and have therefore expunged people like Joseph Hendricks (also known as Axab) from it.Hengari challenges us to open the debate and recognise that the history we construct is not free from our political biases and interests.In order to get a balanced picture and to reach a plausible account of our past we must welcome contestation.There is nothing threatening about allowing “a thousand flowers to bloom”.On the contrary, ridding ourselves of the culture of fear, silence and slavishness, may just kick-start the much promised – but rather illusive – African Renaissance.Lucy Edwards Windhoek