WINDHOEK – Swanu president Usutuaije Maamberua wants government to confirm whether the 35 skulls and two skeletons to be returned to Namibia from Germany on March 7 in a second repatriation exercise are truly Namibian remains.
Maamberua caught parliamentarians by surprise on Thursday in the National Assembly when he asked the Minister of Youth, Sport and Culture, Jerry Ekandjo, whether DNA tests were performed on the remains to confirm that they are indeed of Namibian origin.
“Were all the tests such as DNA conducted to make sure that these skulls are Namibian skulls?” Maamberua asked about the remains to be repatriated from Berlin and Freiburg next week.
Ekandjo was briefing parliament about the impending trip, when Maamberua rose to ask the seemingly inappropriate question, which left most of the Swapo Party MPs in bewilderment. “How can you ask such a question. Just sit down,” said the livid Minister of Justice, Utoni Nujoma.
Approached for comment yesterday the Minister of Presidential Affairs, Dr Albert Kawana, accused Maamberua of attempting to gain political mileage out of the country’s bitter history. “Nobody has the right to come up with cheap politics, while the nation is in mourning,” said an irate Kawana. “Our history is a national one, because everyone sacrificed to liberate the country from colonialism. Unprecedented events that took place in 1890 and 1904 were national tragedies, because groups such as the Nama, Ovaherero, San, Damara and even the Oshiwambo were involved,” he said.
Kawana charged that Maamberua used the wrong platform to pose the question.
“Definitely the tests were done. So it is rather unfortunate on his [Maamberua] part, because as far as I am concerned the Namibian government and the authorities in Germany agreed that scientific analysis must be done to determine that the remains are from Namibia and it was done,” Kawana said.
The delegation to be led by the youth minister left for Germany last night to go and receive 14 skulls from the Alexander Ecker Collection of the University of Freiburg on March 4, which will be handed over at the ‘Haus zur Lieben Hand’.
On March 5, the Namibian delegation will receive 21 further skulls and two skeletons, which are held in the anthropological collections of the Charité University Hospital in Berlin. Government said the 10-man delegation will cost taxpayers N$1 million. The first repatriation exercise, which took place in October 2011 had an entourage of about 65 people, and cost taxpayers N$1.7 million.
The remains were removed during colonial times by the German administration, German troops or their physicians and scientists in the early 1900s to study in order to ‘prove’ the ostensibly racial superiority of white Europeans over black Africans, among others.
It is believed about 300 skulls of Namibians slaughtered in concentration camps during the colonial uprising of 1904 to 1908 were taken to Germany to prove perverse racial theories, which later led to Nazi Germany’s genocidal ideology.
By Mathias Haufiku