Sunday, February 9, 2025 at 9:23 AM
Last week, Sam Nujoma, the founding president of an independent Namibia, died at age 95. Mr. Nujoma joins the ranks of some of the greatest freedom fighters in the pantheon of heroes, of glory, revolution, liberation and sacrifice, worldwide. He joins Ben Bella, Garvey, Ghandi, Lumumba, Nkrumah, Kenyatta, Bolivar, Mandela, Sankara, L’Overture, Soberanis, Castro, Crazy Horse, Washington, Cheddi Jagan, Obote, Malcom X, and so many others, as heroes in the struggle to overcome oppression, and to live free!
Whether you agree or not with their politics, or their actions taken to liberate their countries from the yoke of colonialism, you have to admire their willingness to go to any lengths for the betterment of their people! Some gave their lives; some gave up their personal welfare, for the greater good. Some became tyrants; but most are heroes, and their need for freedom was driven by a certain nobility that most of the rest of us could never possess!
These freedom fighters paved the way for a world that saw the gradual disappearance of colonialism! They instilled pride and nationalism in the hearts and souls of their fellow countrymen, and became positive examples for oppressed peoples all over the world! Their contributions to a better world, in most cases, can never be forgotten, nor exaggerated, nor in my opinion, be maligned!
Today, our so-called leaders are mostly soft, self-conscious, greedy, and do not represent their constituents, but special interests! Whether it is in America, Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, the special interests usually prevail in their appetites for more, at the expense of the poor, the disenfranchised! It is like Murphy’s Law in its constancy. Wat a ting!
It is most obvious right now in the United States of America, where the supposedly richest man in the world (and I’m not sure he is, I think Putin and some of those Gulf States rulers are much richer) is running the country, while all the elected leaders stand by and genuflect! If not for the judicial branch, we would all be in trouble. Whatever shreds of democracy, small “d”, we still purport to enjoy, would have already been swallowed up in an orgy of greed and corruption and power!
We, who are lucky to be called peoples of the Third World, who aspire to achieve wealth and power, now do so without acknowledging or even knowing the sacrifices that were made, to get us to the point where we can even dream of those expectations! We take our state for granted, forgetting the struggles that afford us the opportunity to even be able to want more!
Going back to all those heroes who have now passed on to the end of the path, one has to wonder where they got the courage, the inspiration, the strength, to fight and win those seemingly impossible battles. Imagine facing betrayal, torture, and death at any moment; and not blinking, or yielding, because your purpose was righteous and real. You did not have stifled dreams, but foresight and determination to make the world a better place, a place of equity and inclusion! Again, wat a ting!
Because we don’t understand or are even aware, in most cases, of the bravery and sacrifices of these giants, we settle for dwarfs who are slowly taking us back into that underworld of submission and darkness. We are voluntarily giving up our freedoms to scumbags who don’t care about us, only about themselves and their cronies, while the rest of us fight for the scraps they leave behind! And this is occurring worldwide, not only in America, which is now being run by a racist South African and an allegedly diaper-wearing and, not allegedly, convicted felon, both powered by the people’s will, in the last election!
“We, the people” is once again only a dream, not a reality anymore! WTF?
Glen