A Namibian politician named Adolf Hitler Uunona has been elected as a local councillor in the Ompundja constituency in the north of the country.
Uunona, a candidate for the governing SWAPO party, easily won the vote last month, gaining 1 196 of the 1 421 votes cast.
Uunona said that his father had chosen the name and that he had probably not understood what Hitler had stood for. He also said it was only as he got older that he himself realised the connotation.
He reportedly joked with journalists from the German newspaper, Bild, that he had no plans for world domination
German names are common in Namibia, which was a German colony from 1884 to 1915. There is still a German ethnic minority in Namibia.
The election in which Uunona gained a seat was part of local government elections held last month in which SWAPO received something of a bloody nose.
In the previous local elections in 2015, SWAPO won 112 of the 121 regional council seats. This dropped to 88 last month. Two relatively new parties fared well, with the Landless People’s Movement winning 11 seats, and the Independent Patriots for Change, a party founded by a former independent presidential candidate, Panduleni Itula, winning five seats. The remaining seats were split between three other parties and independents.