Africa-Press – Namibia. I have purposefully titled this tribute to Rikondja Ben Karamata, ‘The Quintessential Intellectual’.
Despite having been many different things to me during what I would say has been a short sojourn, I have known him more than a good time, and indeed it has been a good time of knowing him.
A good time for many, and most may have seemed like a time of socialising, but it has been for me more a time of fertilising his rich intellectual proclivities.
During the time I have had the privilege of being close to him, I have come to establish him as more than a mere acquaintance. He was a friend and brother, hailing from the same matrilineal lineage known as eyanda of the Ovakuahere, from which I also hail culturally.
Politically, we once were from the same school.
Indeed, it is a school whose imprint we have never been able to shed. This school is Swanu, which partially introduces us to the teachings of Marxist-Leninism and thus the socialist ideology in which both of us not only strongly believed but also have remained adhered to till the end of our journey, as we are witnessing.
We not only came to embrace the ideology dogmatically but also scholarly, through our understanding of dialectical materialism.
Having gone the extra mile of studying it, not necessarily as a matter of political expedience but to be able to understand why change was needed, as was then espoused by Swanu during the first phase of the Namibian revolution, which was about political kingdom, as the founding president of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, would put it. Maintaining that such a political kingdom, meaning the political freedom of many colonised African countries, was necessary as a stepping stone towards economic independence.
The latter are what all the African countries, without any exception, are still wrestling with more than 60 years after Nkrumah’s political kingdom.
There is and has been no indication whatsoever that the former imperialist capitalist colonising countries shall ever let go of the former colonies, including Namibia. Hence, it is more reason the likes of the late Ben have remained convinced in alternative systems such as socialism and the ideology of Marxist-Leninism.
In this context, I cannot help but confine myself to his thinking in this regard, which he has been sharing with postings on social media.
This has established him to be a prolific, albeit a highly intellectual, writer in his own right, whom many a Namibian have come to hate him for as well, but at the same time could not have otherwise but are equally compelled to love him to the extent of impulsively finding themselves in his company.
During impromptu sessions, which, if need be, you would find yourself being bullied into agreement with his postulations. Postulations, which for most of the time were scholarly presented as per the scholarly approach that RBK had.
Because if there is one thing outstanding about RBK, it is that he was not only well read but also well vested in the intellectual arena, and added to it the diplomatic field, as many who have crossed paths with him in this regard may testify.
There is a saying in English referring to a ‘Jack of all trades and a master of none’. There was hardly any subject that RBK could not engage himself and others in, but so masterly in many, if not most.
As ageing was catching up with him, his engaging personality was diverted to social media postings.
This is not for the posterity of social engagement, but raising various issues across the spectrum.
From politics, diplomacy, culture and ideology, there has hardly been a subject he has not covered in his postings.
This was not done for the sake of writing, but to raise real and pertinent issues.
In this regard, one cannot help but hail the emergence of social media.
For where and who would have given the likes of RBK, despite their existence and the relevance and pertinence of their outlooks, such a platform and the mainstream such an imperative voice?
Out there, believe me, are many RBKs whose voices have been clamouring for ventilation.
For the mainstream media, true to the bourgeois society that Namibia is, it is there and has been there only to serve the interests of the bourgeoisie.
“A new model of security in the Middle East must be established that guarantees sovereign equality of all states without American or Western interference.
“America must be ordered to leave the Middle East forever, ending long decades of American imperialism,” reads one of his last sunset postings, if not the last posting.
One of his favourite subjects, naturally as a bona fide descendant of the survivors of the genocide of the Ovaherero, Ovambanderu and Nama, was this very genocide.
Imploring early this January on the eve of the 121st anniversary of the beginning in Okahandja of the armed resistance against Imperial Germany, the various leaders of the descendants rallied together.
“The year 2025 should signal the end of the dark days of internal disputes and regression,” RBK posted.
We are today over the halfway mark of 2025, but we are yet to see and/or hear the leaders heeding RBK’s clarion call, which by no means must be the call of most descendants. “The idea of the Joint Declaration is for the Ovaherero nation to sell their genocide and reparations claims to Germany for a pittance of 1.8 billion euros, leaving ancestral lands, wealth and heritage.
“Parliament must correct the president on the Ovaherero Genocide 1904 Motion brought by the late Paramount Chief Dr Kuaima Riruako. There’s no reference to the Namibian genocide.”
“Let me help spell it out to the government that the Ovaherero/Nama genocide 1904/1908, we, the descendants, are not looking for sympathy or generosity.”
“The message to the Ovaherero youth is to reorganise, develop the consciousness and never forget or forgive, but to focus on how to fight German neo-colonial imperialist settlerism in Namibia… Your struggle against historical injustices never ended with national independence.”
These are just bare snapshots of what RBK had been posting.
One can and shall never exhaust them.
The pertinent question is how many are and have been familiar with his postings and, most importantly, their messages?
I cannot but be reminded of a posting once by King Ipumbu Kazondunge, also well known as ‘Welcome’, who was perplexed by the silence of RBK’s postings.
Postings, especially “our” democratic representatives.
“Is it for lack of conceptualising his postings or ‘I’m so confident that genocide, inclusive of reparations, shall be won only when we heed the call of Diplomat Karamata, and that is going the ICJ route,” King Kazondunge concluded.
Well, RBK has run his race and has been gracefully, intellectually and socially revolutionary in doing so.
It is now left to whom?
All of us as descendants and revolutionaries need to provide the answer imbued and conscious of the song by diasporan revolutionary, the late Bob Marley’s Redemption Song: “How long shall they kill our prophets while we stand aside and look? Yes, some say it’s just a part of it. We’ve got to fulfil the book”.
Are our prophets being killed by some other people or ourselves?
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