A politician named after Germany’s Adolf Hitler has been elected councillor in a Namibian regional election. However, unlike the man he was named after, Adolf Hitler Uunona says he has no plan for world domination.
The politician, who normally goes by the name Adolf Uunona, got 85% of the votes in last week’s election in Ompundja, a small town in the far north of the country.
In the candidates’ list, Hitler was reduced to the initial: ‘H’.
Uunona won 1,196 votes in the recent election compared to 213 for his opponent, giving him a seat on the regional council
Namibia is a former German colony and there are still reminders of that time in some placenames.
“My father named me after this man. He probably didn’t understand what Adolf Hitler stood for,” Mr Uunona said in a recent interview.
“It was a very normal name for me as a child. It was not until I was growing up that I realised that this man wanted to subjugate the whole world. I have nothing to do with any of these things.”
The German occupation of Namibia, which ended after World War One, has bitter memories for the people there.
Between 1904 and 1908 its colonial forces killed more than 80% of Namibia’s Nama and Herero populations, in what historians now call “the forgotten genocide”.
Adolf Hitler was a German politician and leader of the Nazi Party.
During his dictatorship from 1933 to 1945, he initiated World War II in Europe by invading Poland on 1 September 1939. He was closely involved in military operations throughout the war and was central to the perpetration of the Holocaust.
Mr Uunona’s SWAPO party has ruled Namibia since independence from apartheid South Africa in 1990. Namibia was once known as German South West Africa and was a German colony from 1884.
A small German-speaking community still lives in the country today, and around 120,000 Germans visit Namibia every year.
