Yours truly could not help but muse after reading an article in the Afrikaans medium local newspaper, Republikein, last Friday.

Skoner geslag maak skoonskip, reads a headline to the said article about girls in private schools performing well in the examinations of the Independent Examination Council (IEC) over and above their fellow male learners. 
Who would have thought such a council existed in an independent Namibia? Independent from what and why? But more striking is the fact that the council caters for predominantly, if not exclusively, white schools.

In fact that this could be the case as was evident with white girl learners’ photo in the said article. On intuition one could not but commend these learners, women for that matter, for their excellence. 

But on a deeper reflection the sad reality could not but dawn. This sad or rather re-awakening reality is that  our white citizens seem, instead of embracing reconciliation and co-existence, to mysteriously be retreating  and re-entrenching themselves in their customary apartheid white laager with the so-called independent-cum-private schools, now fronted by their guardian angel, the IEC. 

These schools and the IEC cannot be seen purely in an educational sense but certainly must have wider ideological intent, and by extent socio-economic and cultural ones, smacking of the old apartheid edifice whose intent was the advancement of whites only. 

The only difference this time is that they do not have the apartheid government to prod and protect them in their exclusive self-development and advancement endeavours. 

This self and separate development cannot be different from that of the old apartheid system for all intents and purposes, which is the continuation of the white hegemony in all facets and aspects of existence, as opposed to co-existence. 

To a certain degree this self development cannot be said to be the result of the efforts of this racial group without exploiting post-independent Namibia’s political dispensation characterised by the empty and meaningless ideology of reconciliation. 
Reconciliation which has left the exploitative socio-economic edifices of the colonial apartheid era, to a great extent intact and highly skewed in favour of this group. With attempts to unbundle it at best cosmetic and half-hearted. Hence the previously disadvantaged white group, so to speak, has in the post-independent Namibia, with little hindrance, been building on more than hundred years of self-enrichment, hence further entrenching themselves economically and otherwise. 

While the Africans, on the other hand, continue to recover from genocidal wars perpetrated by European colonialism for some, and subsequent apartheid exploitation as perpetrated by apartheid South Africa, and the rest of the capitalist world against them. 

In this context private schools, which for that matter are predominantly white, if not exclusively so though not de jure but de facto through historical factors, cannot be seen either from any other perspective but the continuation and entrenchment of white hegemony, as a proxy of the worldwide capitalist white hegemony with its flipside the continuation and exploitation of the African race. 

This is why the said private and/or Christian schools cannot innocently be seen and perceived as just educational institutions but harbingers of white ideology reminiscent of bastions of white apartheid ideology such as Kultura 4000 that existed in pre-colonial Namibia, of which the IEC must be its very re-incarnation and the renaissance of white ideology. 

One cannot but wonder how many African learners there may be in these schools and how come they do not seem to be among the best performers. But it cannot be surprising because while among the Namibian Africans such schools may illusively represent excellence and held in high regard for the prestige that they may be seen to represent, in reality one cannot but wonder how an African soul and character can ever expect realistic and constructive  moulding  and nurturing of an African character in a real African sense  given their Christian façade, in essence no more than a smokescreen for Caucasian hegemony. This surely is a wake-up call for the African race. To see  these schools for what they really are: bastions of Christianity, and thus white and  Western culture. The challenge for the African race is to build their own institutions geared towards African souls and characters that can compete on equal terms with white souls globally rather than continuing to play second fiddle to their white counterparts. 

Because as much as we would want to pretend that Namibia is no longer a country of white and black, we cannot run away from this naked truism. Unless the Africans wake up and repent from holding everything that is white as superior and sacrosanct, like the private schools in this country, seen as prestigious and the key to the white world, we shall continue to produce zombies serving the white world. There’s simply no prestige in these private Christian schools unless prestige means whiteness.