By Staff Reporter
WINDHOEK
It was with great shock and disbelief that the Pan African Center of Namibia (Pacon) read of the so-called History Grade 10 Project at the Windhoek High School, a press statement from the chairperson of Pacon announced.
“This so-called history project can only be described as a-historical, a paranoia of the past, and best still, a discredited myopic colonial historical outlook of the highest order. Pacon is on record that such attempts at vilifying Africa and her leaders will not go unchallenged. Africa and Africans have suffered enough at the bloodstained hands of the colonialists and imperialists. Such sufferings will not be allowed by our gene-ration to rear their ugly heads again, at least not in the 21st century,” said Johannes Tjitjo on behalf of the organization.
According to him, Dr Kwame Nkrumah is an African intellectual, a Pan-Africanist, a liberator and an icon of freedom and self-determination of the African people as well as those in the entire world.
“The current African Union (AU) is notably the realization of his dream 50 years ago, of African unity, culminating in a continental government. For long, the history of Africa and of the African people was deliberately twisted to suit the colonial interests of the colonizers. Africa was labelled ‘the dark continent’. Its people were referred to as ‘backward’ and ‘barbaric’. Such descriptions were cleverly coined in order to justify colonial invasion and occupation,” he charged.
It is Pacon’s belief that, in the words of the revolutionary Cuba’s Fidel Castro, “the battle of ideas has now started”.
“Pacon urges all patriotic Namibian intellectuals, scholars and researchers to start laying bare the historical facts of our African leaders in an objective and constructive manner.
“Our school learners should also resist being fed with historical garbage, loaded with connotations of reliving the colonial past. The days when we were idolizing Verwoerd, Anna Steenkamp, Jan van Riebeek, Vasco da Gama, Christopher Columbus, Cecil John Rhodes and the likes are over, never to be repeated again in the Republic of Namibia. The school and the teacher in question should explain this unwarranted mishap to the Namibian nation,” Tjtjo concluded.