The Namibian Adolf
he German newspaper Bild has been speaking to a man called Adolf Hitler Uunona who has been elected as a local councillor for Namibia’s governing Swapo party.
The politician, who normally goes by the name Adolf Uunona, got 85% of the votes in last month’s election in Ompundja, a small town in the far north of the country.
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In the candidates’ list, Hitler was reduced to an initial:
List of candidates
ECNCopyright: ECN
But the official results list his full name:
Results announcement
ECNCopyright: ECN
Namibia is a former German colony and there are still reminders of that time in some placenames. There is also a small German-speaking minority.
“My father named me after this man. He probably didn’t understand what Adolf Hitler stood for,” Mr Uunona told Bild.
“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 and pre-dated Hitler’s rise to power, has bitter memories for the people there.
Between 1904 and 1908, German colonial forces killed more than 80% of Namibia’s Nama and Herero populations in what historians now call “the forgotten genocide”.
