The Tanganyika And Napundwe Emperors Are Without Clothes

EVEN if my overall discussion was nuanced, I posed in my last piece the coarse question as to whether the Swapo Party Electoral College that was held over the weekend would mark the humiliation of the Tanganyika generation. It may have sounded to some as if I was in a cowardly fashion kicking ‘old men and women’. But I wasn’t. It just a problematique that I interrogated.

Be that as it may, the dye has been cast and given the excitement (intellectual in my case) the final list generated many discussions and analyses. However, I need mention that the discussions and analyses about the final list generated more heat than light.The debate confirmed in many ways our tendency to look at what confirms our knowledge and not our ignorance. Therefore, to argue that the final list marked a ‘status quo’ or the triumph or the resistance of the old guard over the young elephants would be less than helpful.Such a zero-sum game view of the list would be ignoring important dynamics within Swapo and looking at the Swapo Party Youth League (SPYL) as a homogenous organ of the Party – one that articulates its interests independent of the internal dynamics within Swapo.Admittedly, parochial analyses focusing on the homogeneity of the Youth League are more informed by the political posturing of this organ prior to the College and their intermittent cosmetic defiance of authority and the established orthodoxy. Yet, many ignored that this type of defiance of authority is based on a desire by the League to wear ‘unconventional clothes’ when analysed in terms of the Party orthodoxy. The posturing of the Youth bordered in essence on what social scientists call cheap signalling.In practice, it would be hard for the Youth to effect a cataclysmic aggiornamento of the Party at an Electoral College.It would be intellectually naïve to have expected such an upheaval. This is particularly so because the Youth League acts paradoxically in concert with the political generation of Tanga – and against Tanga. Therefore, the final list does not mark the status quo, nor does it mark the critical conjuncture that many expected. On the contrary, what is without dispute is that it lucidly highlights important trends that cannot be ignored in any serious analysis about the Swapo Party. Fernand Braudel, the foremost French historian of the post-war era and leader of the influential Annales school of History, makes the analytical distinction between the ‘courte duree’ (short span or history of events) and the ‘longue duree’ (long span).For Braudel, analysis that looks at the history of events is trivial. Similarly as an admirer of Braudel, the shift taking place in Swapo might be imperceptible and slow. But it is this inertia and the longue duree that ought to be stressed in order to observe that there is or has been an incremental shift from one political generation to another. When we look at it carefully, this process has indeed been in motion for a decade now.We are only witnessing the incremental consolidation of that process in the longue duree. The point deserving emphasis now is that there are new emperors in the party and their consolidation on the list in the comfort of the top twenty provides them with fodder to lay claim to the cockpit of the Party.The usual suspects who have long dominated the top ten of the list have been deposed. Even if they appear in respectable positions, we can’t ignore in any serious analysis what appears to the naked eye a trivial shift. These are shifts that do signal the exodus of a certain generation.The markers are there and it would be difficult, even foolhardy, for those associated with Tanga to continue beyond the next Swapo Party Congress in 2012.The preliminary conclusion we could make here is that while the Electoral College did not mark the mass exodus of Tanga, it did in fact signal an imperceptible shift in the locus of power (at least in terms of intent) from that political generation to a new political aristocracy. It is this Black Swan (missing in much of the analyses about the list) that signals that the traditional emperors are without clothes. * Alfredo Tjiurimo Hengari is a Ph.D fellow at the Univerisity of Paris-Pantheon-Sorbonne, Paris.