It’s no joke. Nor is it evidence of some resurgent National Socialism. Namibia, a country in southwest Africa that has gotten little attention in the U.S. ever since Garrett Morris, in the guise of a Namibian official, issued an urgent appeal for fondue sets on Saturday Night Live in 1976, now has a new claim to fame. A politician whose name is actually Adolf Hitler Uunona is running for re-election as a district councilor, and is very likely to win again. He insists that his name is not an indication of any larger nefarious forces at work. This time, it may really not be.
Adolf Hitler Uunona is a member of the leftist SWAPO (South West Africa People’s Organization) party, and despite his leftism, appears to be well-liked among his constituents: he won 84.88% of the vote in 2020, and stands to win another comfortable victory in the election on Wednesday. The people of Oshana, where Uunona’s district of Ompundja is located, clearly don’t mind his name.
Uunona says that he does not emerge from a family of National Socialist ideologues. He is 59 years old, which means that he was born in 1966, 21 years after his namesake put an end to his own mad, evil life. Hitler may be revered in some quarters, but Uunona insists he was not in Namibia when he was growing up. Back in 2020, Uunona told the German newspaper Bild: "For me, as a child, it was a completely normal name. Only as an adolescent did I understand: This man wanted to conquer the whole world. I have nothing to do with any of that."
Uunona was anxious to be reassuring, adding: “The fact that I have this name doesn't mean that I want to subjugate Oshana now. It doesn't mean that I'm striving for world domination. My father named me after this man. He probably didn't even understand what Adolf Hitler stood for." Uunona doesn’t even seem to be a follower of Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens or Nick Fuentes.
Bild explains that the brief period of German colonization (1884-1915) left behind a continuing influence: “The first name Adolf is not uncommon in the former colony of German South-West Africa. There is also a German-language newspaper, German radio stations, street names (such as Bahnhofstraße, Bismarckstraße), German place names (Lüderitz, Mariental, Helmeringhausen, etc.), and a small German-speaking minority. Until a few years ago, there was even a ‘Blitzkrieg Bunker Bar,’ a heavy metal pub, in the capital city of Windhoek. The ruling Swapo party has its headquarters on Hans-Dietrich-Genscher-Straße.”
All right, but is there any nostalgia for Hitler? The Bild story carried a photo that bore this caption: “’Adolf Hitler’ and a swastika are visible on this car from Adolf Hitler Uunona's Oshana constituency.” Uunona, however, maintained the car neither belonged to him nor reflected his beliefs.
Still, it’s understandable that people would be concerned. Jew-hatred is enjoying a new vogue in the West, and in some places it has never gone out of style. A Turkish translation of Hitler’s Mein Kampf was a bestseller in Turkey in 2005. Israeli forces found an Arabic translation in a Hamas jihad base in Gaza in Nov. 2023. Also in Gaza, a clothing store called “Hitler 2” operated for years, right up until the war. In the mid-2000s, a man named Hitler Tantawi was an Egyptian government official. At an Indonesia wax museum in 2017, one of the most popular attractions was that visitors could get their picture taken with a wax Adolf Hitler.
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Namibia, of course, is not Gaza, or any other majority-Muslim area. Still, it’s hard to believe that as late as 1966, even people in Namibia didn’t have at least some general idea of what Hitler did and what he stood for. Adolf Hitler Uunona is likely relatively harmless as politicians go, and he insists that he cannot change his name because “it’s in all the official documents,” but still, even if there is no gang of “Groypers” in dusty Windhoek, it is a name that forces people to take notice.
Wittingly or unwittingly, and willingly or unwillingly, Adolf Hitler Uunona reminds us that among some people, even if he himself is not one of them, the evil ideas for which Hitler destroyed Germany are still with us. Given the nature of our fallen world, evil is never totally defeated or completely eradicated, and free people must fight against it anew in every age. If they do not do so, they will not remain free for long. That is the choice that faces us now, and will continue to face it whether or not the good people of Oshana decide to put their trust once again in their friend Adolf Hitler Uunona.
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