Earlier this month, I took my son and nephews to a restaurant at Gobabis to celebrate one of them’s 17th birthday.
The establishment has an undeniably warm and inviting farm-style atmosphere. Its decor is carefully curated. Its ambience is pleasant. But the warmth of the setting was overshadowed by what I found on the menu.
Some of the burgers are named Groot Baas, Ou Nooi (albeit Noi), Klein Baas, and Klein Nooi (Noi).
Some may dismiss these names as harmless farm humour, nostalgic Afrikaans expressions, or playful references to rural life. That is the problem!
They are not innocent words. They are part of a vocabulary of racial domination, forced deference and humiliation.
They come from a world in which white authority was normalised and black subordination expected.
Groot Baas referred to senior white male authority figures, and Ou Nooi to the senior white woman in the household or farm hierarchy.
Klein Baas and Klein Nooi referred to younger white members, who were addressed as “little boss” or “young madam” by black workers.
It is not merely a matter of language. These terms were integral to the colonial and apartheid systems that entrenched power imbalances and compelled recognition of racial superiority.
Terms like these taught children born into privilege that authority was theirs by birth.
It taught adult black workers that age, dignity and experience did not matter when race determined status. In that world, the white child was “baas”. The black adult was “boy” or “girl”.
Such language predates formal apartheid, but apartheid normalised the racial order it expressed. On farms in Namibia and South Africa, it helped sustain a paternalistic system in which land, wages, movement, housing and social standing were controlled by white landowners.
The language of baasskap told people where they belonged.
Placing these terms on a restaurant menu cannot be treated as neutral branding. Gobabis and the Omaheke region are deeply connected to land, labour, cattle farming and the historical wounds of dispossession. Many know what farm paternalism meant.
They know the indignity of being expected to smile through humiliation. They know racial hierarchy was often enforced not only through law and violence but through everyday words.
To print Groot Baas, Ou Nooi, Klein Baas and Klein Nooi on a menu packages a painful racial past as aesthetic nostalgia. It invites customers to casually repeat words many black Namibians associate with degradation and servitude.
It may not have been the owner’s intention. But impact matters, especially in a society still carrying the unfinished work of repair.
There is also a legal and constitutional dimension attached to the use of these terms. Namibia’s constitutional order is founded on human dignity, equality and a decisive rejection of apartheid.
The Racial Discrimination Prohibition Act (1991) specifically regulates discrimination in public amenities and the provision of goods and services. It includes public restaurants within the meaning of public amenities.
It prohibits the public use of language, written matter or displays made with the intent to threaten or insult people on racial grounds, cause or encourage racial hatred, or disseminate ideas based on racial superiority.
Whether a particular menu crosses that legal threshold would depend on the facts, including intent and context.
However, the ethical issue is unavoidable. A restaurant menu is a public document.
It is repeated in orders. If black waiters and waitresses must say these names over and over while serving customers, the business risks reproducing the verbal hierarchy from which these terms draw their meaning.
Some will say this is oversensitivity. I disagree. The demand for dignity is not oversensitivity. The language of historical subordination is not fragility. It is memory. It is conscience.
It is the minimum requirement of a society that claims to have broken with apartheid.
Namibia’s project of reconciliation, with all its flaws, was never meant to require black people to accept the casual recycling of words that once marked them as inferior.
Reconciliation without dignity becomes silence. Heritage without honesty becomes nostalgia for oppression. Humour at the expense of the historically oppressed is not humour. It is injury dressed as branding.
To her credit, when I raised my concern with the manager on duty, she listened carefully and appeared to understand why the names were offensive.
She undertook to convey my concerns to the owner. I hope she did, and I hope the owner receives it in the spirit in which it is offered: not as an attack on a business, but as an invitation to do better.
The right thing to do is simple: change the names.
– John Nakuta is a social justice scholar. He is a life activist on justice, human rights, the rule of law, and governance. This article is written in his personal capacity.
