Gerson Uaripi Tjihenuna
Dr Shaun Whittaker and Harry Boesak published a piece in The Namibian of 28 April 2023 under the heading: ‘Workers’ Struggle: Odalate Naiteke’. The latter means to cut the wire, referring to the vicious contract labour system that was common before independence.
About three years ago, I had a series of polemics with the two gentlemen over the same issues. They are dear friends and I once shared a panel discussion platform with Dr Whittaker on some of these issues.
For the record, I do not have a problem with the pro-worker cause that they have been championing over the years; it is a noble cause.
As a medical professional, Dr Whittaker is part of the middle class; and for him to do what he is doing, advancing the cause of the ‘workers’ through his writings is tantamount to what Amilcar Cabral would call ‘class suicide’. That is, in itself, a feather in his cap.
Secondly, throughout my adult life, I have always had a strong leftist bent, something that I have in common with my two friends, who refer to themselves as Members of the Marxist Group of Namibia.
The biggest problem that I have with their discourse is the absence of ‘sensitivity’ when it comes to the usage of certain concepts. Rigorous, hard-nosed scholarship calls for the dissection and clinical qualification of concepts.
In the very first paragraph of their piece, they assert: ‘…it is vital to recover the history of working-class struggles in Namibia to counter the revisionism of moderate Pan-Africanism.’ The question is, who has denied the history of these different workers’ struggles and how was that done to justify the need for this ‘recovery?’ Again, what is meant by ‘countering the revisionism of moderate Pan-Africanism?’ What is meant by ‘revisionism’ or ‘moderate Pan-Africanism’ for that matter? All these concepts beg for dissection.
Furthermore, such concepts are also very subjective; whose definition are we talking about and what are their social interest in defining such concepts? Lastly, and most importantly so, ‘revisionism’ as measured against which and whose social criteria?
Truth claims are a contested space and we need to dissect and qualify concepts if we want to show serious scholarship presence.
However, the one fundamental issue on which my dear colleagues and I are poles apart is their understanding of the Namibian ‘working class’. The polemics I had with them about three years ago were mainly anchored around this issue. I submit that the reference to the ‘working class’ in their piece is unfortunately misplaced. I have always argued that in the strictest Marxist definition of a working class, in Namibia, we can, at best, only refer to an embryonic working class or peasant workers.
In my book, what we have in Namibia are mainly peasant workers, who have one foot in the peasantry and their other foot in industry. Most industrial workers in Namibia have a rural home base to return to when they either lose their jobs or retire.
The issue with peasant workers is that they tend to have, what I call, for lack of a better word, dual class consciousness and dual class loyalty. Their social base is mainly peasantry and they, temporarily, come to towns, mines or commercial farms for work purposes only. There could be small pockets of members of the working class amongst these workers, but by far, the majority are peasant workers.
You are not a member of the working class by merely working in a factory, for example, but chiefly because of your social base, because it is your social base that determines your class consciousness. The majority of the people who are wrongly referred to as members of the working class by my two colleagues are peasant workers and their social base is mainly peasantry.
As I have argued elsewhere, South Africa, because of its strong industrial base, has over many years, created a strong working class that has developed, in the Gramscian sense of the word, from a class in itself (an objective category) to a class for itself (a subjective agent). That simply means that this working class is class conscious and it does not have any other social base, apart from being a working class.
African Marxists have, for years, been stuck in the class analysis as a social unit of analysis and, for the most part, have never come around to factoring in ethnic identity as an important category in their analysis. The ‘wrong-footed’ notion that ethnicity has never been a problem amongst the ‘workers’ in Namibia stems from that, but the reality on the ground is different. The fact that, so far, no leftist political party has emerged in independent Namibia that has managed to garner enough support from the ‘workers’ regardless of their ethnic background is testimony to the absence of class consciousness among Namibian ‘workers’ – hence my assertion that referring to a working class in Namibia can be problematic.
My parting thoughts to my dear friends are this. Since the collapse of communism in Eastern and Central Europe in the early nineties, neo-liberalism and multi-party democracy has, for better or for worse, won the day as the twin norms of what has come to be known as the ‘good governance’ paradigm. This has left the Global Left with a ‘wounded and tired’ agenda. The Global Left needs to re-group, pick up the pieces and re-define the agenda.
I hope that this rejoinder will not be taken personally by my two colleagues. I respectfully beg to differ with them on the way they ‘shy away’ from dissecting some of the key concepts, but theirs is otherwise a well-researched piece.