Pieces of a Dream

By Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie

Piece One

The truth is that the eight months I spent in Namibia saddened me.  I have read at least a hundred times that the way to go into anything is without expectations.   But tell me, how can an African-American go anywhere near the African continent and have no expectations?

I did not think that there would be a “Welcome-Home Long-Lost-Sister-Committee” greeting me at the airport. I did not expect to see traditional dancing every night. I didn't exactly know what to expect, but I know what I did not expect.

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10/30/04

journal entry

And being American, people drive me crazy with their assumptions about who I am and what the US is. There is a lot of ignorance.  The lady at the market is crazy.  She is a grown woman and she thinks the US is Hollywood. I know people get all their ideas from television but they need to think more critically. 

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People often asked me if I knew Ja Rule, 50 Cent, or Jennifer Lopez.  Many of my students were shocked when I told them that Tupac is quite dead.  When I asked my students if they had heard of Martin Luther King or Malcolm X, most of them hadn't.  Maya Angelou and Langston Hughes were also new names for them. There is a fascination with the West, with popular images of Blacks from the States, but there is no real foundation for understanding who we are and why or how we are related.

A colleague and I were talking about the slowly changing roles of men and women in Namibia.  My colleague asked me, “What is it like in your culture?”  Then he corrected himself, “Oh, you don't have a culture.”  Living in Namibia often meant putting myself in context.

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My students were the light of living in Namibia.  In my first classes, I asked the students to interview and introduce each other and then I gave them the chance to interview me.

“What is your mother tongue?” A few students asked.   “English.” They stared at me shocked.  “You’re surprised right?” They'd offer a collective, “Yes.” “Does anyone here know how it is possible that my mother tongue is English?”

Usually the students had no idea.  I would talk to them about the slave trade and what happened to those languages, cultures, and religions we had known so well before we were forced to the other side of the Atlantic. I would tell them how special it was for me to be in Africa after being away for three generations.  Often students would applaud or announce that they were happy I'd come home.

While most of my Namibian colleagues were distant for my first few months, my students were warm, full of life, enthusiasm, and curiosity. My students taught me about apartheid.  My students taught me to put my disappointment in context.

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Maybe I had expected something.  I'd expected the Africa I heard about countless times:  the one where people invited you home for dinner, called you sister, the Africa of traditional healing, the Africa my neighbour from Sierra Leone embodied, I'd expected to have a constant stream of people of good-will-people flowing in and out of the house.  I'd expected unity.

Namibia, I learned through my students, was the lab for apartheid.

These are lines from some of the essays I received from my third year students when I asked them to write about life before independence.

Apartheid was so brutal that even 15 years after independence I could see the scars immediately.

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9/11/04

journal entry

Oppression and colonization mess up people's heads.  They are made to think that they're not good enough.  They are good enough. Smart enough.  Capable enough.  But I already see some of the same things in Namibia that I see in the US and that disturbs me.  I see Afrikaners, Germans, Portuguese, and Chinese people creating businesses and controlling industry and I see the black people whose country this is, working for them and giving them all their money.  Maybe the cuca shops (also know as shebeens, drinking establishments) are black-owned but those are certainly not building healthy communities.  Who owns the lodges and the tour companies here? No one African.  Black folk here need to get up on it financially while they still can or else Namibia will only be African because it is on the African continent.

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People distrust people from different tribes. Western clothes and music abound. White folks still go straight to the front of the line at many institutions and no one questions it.  When my husband asked a woman waiting in line about this practice she said, “Maybe we think the whites are better than us.”  Honestly, there are many things I am still processing, so while I might want to, I don’t think I am ready to talk about relationships between Namibian men and women where it appears that men have absorbed the behavior of their former oppressors.  Nor will I talk about the coloureds, the abundance of shebeens—there were eight in the tiny village next to me—or the complete rejection of traditional spiritual beliefs.

And while SWAPO, the freedom fighters and the ruling party of Namibia, freed the people's bodies, I often looked around and saw a people whose spirits, psyches, and dreams were deeply damaged by apartheid.  I wondered what exactly freedom had, would, and could mean for them.

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Definitions:

Afrikaner/Boer-White South African of Dutch ancestry, often with German or other European ancestors.  Their language is a Dutch derivative called Afrikaans.

Shebeen/Cuca shop-Sometimes licensed, other times not, these are local bars where folks gather to drink, talk, and dance.

SWAPO-Armed liberation movement formed in South West Africa in 1959 to oppose South African rule

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Namibian History

Namibia—known as South West Africa before Independence— is a country with a complex history. The country was taken over by the Germans in the 1880’s, but Germany faced fierce opposition from the Namas and the Hereros, two of the tribes living in the territory.  This opposition led to the massacre of tens of thousands of Hereros, who have started a reparations movement. At the beginning of World War I, South Africa took over the country. In 1948 South Africa’s Afrikaner led National Party won elections and began enforcing the system of apartheid in South African territories.  SWAPO, the South West African People’s Organization, formed to end apartheid and gain independence for Namibia.  On March 21, 1990, after numerous negotiations, armed struggles, and deaths, Namibia became independent.

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The following timeline is from the BBC News website:

1886-90 - Present international boundaries established by German treaties with Portugal and Britain. Germany annexes the territory as South West Africa.

1892-1905 - Suppression of uprisings by Herero and Namas. Possibly 60,000, or 80 per cent of the Herero population, are killed, leaving some 15,000 starving refugees.

South African occupation  

1915 - South Africa takes over territory during First World War.

1920 - League of Nations grants South Africa mandate to govern South West Africa (SWA).

1946 - United Nations refuses to allow South Africa to annex South West Africa. South Africa refuses to place SWA under UN trusteeship.

1961 - UN General Assembly demands South Africa terminate the mandate and sets SWA's independence as an objective.

1966 - Swapo launches armed struggle against South African occupation.

1968 - South West Africa officially renamed Namibia by UN General Assembly.

1972 - UN General Assembly recognises Swapo as "sole legitimate representative" of Namibia's people. 1988 - South Africa agrees to Namibian independence in exchange for removal of Cuban troops from Angola. 1989 - UN-supervised elections for a Namibian Constituent Assembly. Swapo wins.

Independence 1990 March - Namibia becomes independent, with Sam Nujoma as first president.

posted 26 august 2005

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update 23 January 2009