James Muchiri

Namibia sent a delegation to Tehran to "convey heartfelt condolences" during Ayatollah Khameini's funeral. Namibia is a mostly Christian, black African democracy, as is South Africa, another of Iran's major boosters. Yet they back a Persian Shi’a Muslim dictatorship that supports global terrorism, including in Africa. Even more bizarrely, Namibia and South Africa’s politics are dominated by liberation era parties, but they sympathize not with freedom-seeking Iranian protesters but with the regime that cracks down with the type of brutality reminiscent of the very worst colonial violence in Africa. What explains such a contradiction? Mostly this: many governing elites from African liberation movements are staunchly anti-Western. They are so for different reasons, but the outcome is the same: they downplay or even support horrifying brutality as long as it is committed by their ideological comrades “resisting” the West. They reserve their moral condemnations for the West and its allies such as Israel. That they’re willing to do so for a regime as repugnant at Tehran’s demonstrates two things. 1) just how radical their anti-Westernism is. There are few crimes they won’t overlook as long as they're in service of the anti-Western cause. And 2) that the liberation movements that want the world to believe they are voices of conscience are actually ideologues defending some of the world’s worst regimes.