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<h1 id="headline" itemprop="headline" class="">
What's in a name? For this Namibian town, it’s all about (colonial) history </h1>
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Understanding both sides</span>
<p>The residents of Lüderitz are engaged in a battle that will decide
whether its German heritage is literally wiped off the face of the map.</p> </h2>
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<span class="">By</span>
<span class=""><a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Africa/2016/0318/What-s-in-a-name-For-this-Namibian-town-it-s-all-about-colonial-history#"><span class="" itemprop="author">Ryan Lenora Brown</span>, Correspondent<span class="" title="author bio"></span></a></span>
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March 18, 2016 </h3>
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<a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Africa/2016/0318/What-s-in-a-name-For-this-Namibian-town-it-s-all-about-colonial-history#" class=""><span class=""></span><span class=""><br></span></a>
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<img src="http://images.csmonitor.com/csm/2016/03/971072_1_0318-luderitz_standard.jpg?alias=standard_600x400" alt="">
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<div id="photo_credit-1" class="" itemprop="author"> <span class="">Ryan Lenora Brown</span></div> <div id="view_caption-1" class="">View Caption</div> </div>
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!NAMI#NUS, NAMIBIA — </span>400 miles southwest of the Namibian
capital, Windhoek, a narrow ribbon of highway cuts across a ghostly
stretch of empty desert and then without warning, spits its travelers
out into early twentieth century Bavaria – or something that looks
remarkably like it – a candy-colored town replete with restaurants
specializing in schnitzel and lanes of postcard-perfect art nouveau
mansions.</p><div class="">
<div class="">
<img src="http://images.csmonitor.com/csm/2016/03/971115_1_Map%20of%20Namibia_standard.png?alias=original_600" alt=""><div class="">
<span class="" itemprop="author">Rich Clabaugh/Staff</span> </div>
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</div><p>The town may seem like a place time forgot, but it would be
more accurate to say it is a place locked in a fierce battle over what
version of itself it wants to remember. Welcome to Lüderitz. And welcome
also to !Nami#nus.</p><div style="width:100%;border:1px solid rgb(90,90,90);font-family:arial">
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</div><p>Confused yet? So are they.</p><div class=""><div class="">
<span class="">Recommended:</span><a class="" href="http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Africa/2011/0127/Think-you-know-Africa-Take-our-geography-quiz">Think you know Africa? Take our geography quiz.</a>
</div></div><p>The trouble started three years ago, when then-Namibian
president Hifikepunye Pohamba announced that the seaside town’s name
would be changed from Lüderitz – after nineteenth century German
colonial explorer Adolf Lüderitz – back to !Nami#nus, an indigenous
Nama-language term for the area. (The ! and # characters are
representations of two of the four different click sounds in Nama. <a href="http://ryan-brown.podomatic.com/entry/2016-03-18T08_40_18-07_00" target="_blank">Click here to hear three Nama speakers pronounce the name</a>). </p><p>Instantly,
this sleepy town of 12,000 transformed into a dramatic new front in a
long-simmering war that stretches across southern Africa, over whether
or not colonialism should be literally wiped off the face of the map.</p><p>In
some countries, like Mozambique and Zimbabwe, the choice was simple.
Hundreds of old street and town names – and in the case of Zimbabwe,
even the old country name, Rhodesia – <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_placename_renaming_in_Zimbabwe" target="_blank">were scrapped en masse after independence as a symbol of history’s new pivot</a>. Today the streets of cities like Maputo (once Lourenço Marques) and Harare (once Salisbury) read like a who's who of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maputo#Street_names" target="_blank">anti-colonial liberation heroes</a> : Avenida Ho Chi Min, Avenida Kim Il Sung, and Avenida Karl Marx, Julius Nyerere Way and Robert Mugabe Avenue.</p><p>In
other countries like South Africa and Namibia, however, name changes
have met far greater opposition, with many arguing that the <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=RZnXHoMQ_hkC&pg=PT142&lpg=PT142&dq=EXPENSE+OF+CHANGING+STREET+NAMES+SOUTH+AFRICA&source=bl&ots=0JSCwS0dkt&sig=sWHrl_kvcOx2f3-mPZJvQwjW58k&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiz2qHAw8rLAhVFcBoKHQjoAtMQ6AEIOjAF#v=onepage&q=EXPENSE%20OF%20CHANGING%20STREET%20NAMES%20SOUTH%20AFRICA&f=false" target="_blank">money spent</a> on the <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/oct/10/worlddispatch.southafrica" target="_blank">symbolic gesture of eliminating colonial names</a> would be put to better use tackling colonialism’s grittier legacies, like poverty and poor infrastructure.</p><p>“This
isn’t about a name,” says Charles Pieters, a lifelong resident of
Lüderitz. “Our people are dying of hunger and you want to use the money
for this? It doesn’t make any sense.”</p><p>But like many who opposed
the name change, he also has more semantic concerns. He worries the
tongue-twister of a new name will drive away the khaki-clad German
tourists who flock here year round.</p><p>“It’s ugly and no one likes
the sound of it, plain and simple,” one resident of German descent spat.
Some detractors even fret that if you mispronounce !Nami#nus slightly,
you could end up referring to female body parts</p><a name="eztoc21252259_3" id="eztoc21252259_3"></a><h2>And then there was Germany</h2><p>Supporters, meanwhile, argue the colonial name blots out the region’s long pre-colonial history. </p><p>“Before
this town was founded, there were already people there, indigenous
people,” says Jorab /Useb, the director of the Namibian Indigenous
People’s Platform. “For a long time they’ve been denied a sense of
belonging in a place that was originally theirs.” And the dichotomy
between spending money on social services or on name changes is a false
one, he says. “In the long run, changing names is beneficial to social
programs, because it helps people crawl back into history, to have their
existence on the official record somewhere.”</p><p>Product of an
often-forgotten wrinkle in the colonial history in Africa, Lüderitz took
shape during Germany’s brief but vicious rule here, which stretched
from the late nineteenth century to the end of World War I, when it
ceded its vast desert colony to South Africa.</p><div class="">
<div class="">
<img src="http://images.csmonitor.com/csm/2016/03/971075_1_0318-luderitz2_standard.jpg?alias=original_600" alt=""><div class="">
<span class="" itemprop="caption">
An aerial image of the town of Luderitz, now seat of the constituency of
!Nami#nus, which was the indigenous Nama name for the area where the
town now sits.</span>
<span class="" itemprop="author">Ryan Lenora Brown</span> </div>
</div>
</div><p>In the first decade of the twentieth century, the Kaiser’s army waged a self-described campaign of "<a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=CSqc0CsnL-AC&pg=PA139&lpg=PA139&dq=%22destroy+the+rebellious+tribes+by+shedding+rivers+of+blood.%22&source=bl&ots=yjb7cZ79vy&sig=aGtf5vIzmesNenjV5L3SORMY2gw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwidvqTd3cnLAhXCrxoKHccIAAQQ6AEIJDAD#v=onepage&q=%22destroy%20the%20rebellious%20tribes%20by%20shedding%20rivers%20of%20blood.%22&f=false" target="_blank">absolute terrorism</a>" on local Herero and Nama peoples, vowing to "destroy the rebellious tribes by shedding rivers of blood."</p><p>Tens
of thousands were driven into Namibia’s unforgiving desert to die slow
deaths of thirst and starvation, and those who remained were rounded up
and sent to concentration camps.</p><p>The most notorious of these sat
on the wind-whipped Shark Island in Lüderitz. As many as three thousand
Nama people were worked to death there building the town’s port,
buildings, and railway. Women prisoners, meanwhile, were assigned to
boil the heads of the dead and scrape off their skin so that the skulls
could be sent to Germany for anthropological research. Many have argued
the genocide served as a laboratory for <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/dec/04/kaisers-holocaust-olugosa-erichsen-review" target="_blank">testing ideals and techniques of racial purification</a> later used to carry out Europe’s holocaust.</p><p>Today,
Shark Island is a quaint stretch of B&Bs and coffee shops. The only
sideways clue to the area’s dark history is a plaque with a chipped
etching of Cornelius Frederiks – a local leader who died at the camp –
that opaquely reads “We commemorate our heroes.” Nearby is a much
larger wall etched with the names of German pioneers killed in the wars
against the Herero and Nama.</p><p>“This man was a colonialist, and for
many generations, no one in town has known Mr. Lüderitz personally, so
why do we need to keep his name alive any longer?” says Mariana
Draghoender, a Nama resident of the town, who works as a cook in a café
on the waterfront. “People say it’s a problem to pronounce !Nami#nus.
Well, for me it’s easier to say !Nami#nus than Lüderitz.”</p><div class="">
<div class="">
<img src="http://images.csmonitor.com/csm/2016/03/971078_2_0318-luderitz3_standard.jpg?alias=original_600" alt=""><div class="">
<span class="" itemprop="caption">
Schoolchildren study an exhibit on the town's history in the Luderitz Museum, March 2016.</span>
<span class="" itemprop="author">Ryan Lenora Brown</span> </div>
</div>
</div><a name="eztoc21252259_4" id="eztoc21252259_4"></a><h2>A town-wide solution </h2><p>Older
residents like Ms. Draghoender still remember the system of rigid
segregation the town was subjected to under the apartheid South African
rule that followed German retreat, and which still have an unmistakable
imprint on life here.</p><p>“Here, the white people have their side and
we have ours,” Virginia April, a Nama teenager, told a visiting
reporter on a recent morning. “Outside of work we don’t communicate
really, but no one has a problem with one another.”</p><p>But when it came to the name change, the battle lines didn’t come down to race at all. For a rainbow of “<a href="http://allafrica.com/stories/201308230966.html" target="_blank">buchters</a>” – as residents of Lüderitz call themselves – the town’s name has given them an identity, however imperfect, to be a part of.</p><p>“We
cannot change the past,” says Tiser Shivute, a sales representative for
a local beer company, who comes from the Ovambo ethnic group. “We can’t
shy away from the fact that this man was a colonizer, but at the same
time we must also remember that he built our town.”</p><p>For now, the
name controversy has reached a shaky truce. The town itself remains
Lüderitz, but the constituency – what Americans might call the county –
is now !Nami#nus, according to city authorities.</p><p>“We are slowly
starting to recover – the two sides are starting to talk to each other
again,” says Mr. Pieters, an outspoken critic of the name change.
Pieters who is coloured -- or mixed race -- works just outside of town,
selling photos to tourists in a mining ghost town called Kolmanskop,
where the lavish excesses of German colonialism are – quite literally –
being reclaimed by the sands of time. When he looks at the old buildings
slowly filling with sand, Pieters sees an eerie prediction of
Lüderitz’s future.</p><p>“Some people like to joke that Lüderitz is the
next ghost town,” he says. “And maybe it will be if we don’t find a way
to put our money towards the things that really matter, whatever our
name is.”<span id="end-of-story" class="" title="-30-"></span></p>
<a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Africa/2016/0318/What-s-in-a-name-For-this-Namibian-town-it-s-all-about-colonial-history">http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Africa/2016/0318/What-s-in-a-name-For-this-Namibian-town-it-s-all-about-colonial-history</a><br></div><br clear="all"><br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature">**************************************<br>N.b.: Listing on the lgpolicy-list is merely intended as a service to its members<br>and implies neither approval, confirmation nor agreement by the owner or sponsor of the list as to the veracity of a message's contents. Members who disagree with a message are encouraged to post a rebuttal, and to write directly to the original sender of any offensive message. A copy of this may be forwarded to this list as well. (H. Schiffman, Moderator)<br><br>For more information about the lgpolicy-list, go to <a href="https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/" target="_blank">https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/</a><br>listinfo/lgpolicy-list<br>*******************************************</div>
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