A Namibian namesake of the Nazi leader has just been reelected for a fifth consecutive term as a regional councillor. Adolf Hitler Uunona insists that he has nothing whatsoever in common, ideologically, with the Führer.

 

Conspiracy theorists have long claimed that Adolf Hitler faked his suicide and lived out his days in Argentina. But 136 years after his birth, even they would have to admit that any reappearance would be impossible. When a wire story recently announced that “Adolf Hitler” had won an African election, however, it wasn’t a fever dream of fringe groups – it turned out to be true. The winner of a local election in Ompundja, a constituency in northern Namibia, is named Adolf Hitler Uunona.

 

In fact, it was a reelection: the namesake of the infamously notorious German dictator has completed four consecutive terms as a regional councillor since 2004. His political party is nothing like a neo-Nazi outfit – the South West Africa People’s Organisation (Swapo) sits on the centre-left. Born out of Namibia’s liberation movement, the party long upheld a fairly radical anti-colonial line before shifting towards a social-democratic-tinged centrism more favourable to market-friendly policies.

 

 

 

 

Namibia is a former German colony where German-sounding names remain widespread. Adolf Hitler Uunona, now aged 59, assumes that his father “probably didn’t understand” the implications of the choice. “As a child, I thought the name was completely normal. It was only when I grew up that I realised,” says the man so christened.

 

A long-standing opponent of racial segregation – Namibia was under South African control until 1990 – the councillor is said to have no ideological overlap with the architect of the Final Solution. Although he prefers to go by Adolf Uunona in his region of 5,000 inhabitants, where he is very popular, he considers it “too late” to initiate the administrative process of changing his given name.

 

 

 

 

In 2010, French writers Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre de la Patellière explored, in their play Le prénom, the rather thankless nature of the name Adolf, a choice – especially with its Germanic spelling – which could only signal, in Europe, either an adherence to the doctrines of the Third Reich or, at the very least, a mischievous nihilism.

 

In Africa, the only signs of any possible resurgence of Hitlerian thought are to be found in the affinities certain regimes have cultivated with Wagner. The paramilitary group’s most prominent operational commander, Dmitry Utkin, sports Nazi tattoos, and the organisation’s name is said to have been chosen as a nod to the German dictator’s favourite composer.

 

Perhaps the African partners of the Russian mercenaries would plead the same naïveté as that professed by Adolf Hitler Uunona’s father.  - (ANA) -

 

AB/ANA/08 December 2025 - - -