Sometimes travel teaches you more about yourself than about the places you visit. A Belgian backpacker I met mentioned that he had never really studied Belgian colonial history at school but since coming to Africa, he’d discovered that everyone else seemed to be aware of Belgium’s role in the Congo and Rwanda. I’d been thinking something similar for the previous few days. At no point in all my years studying history at school and university did anyone ever say that we (South Africa) illegally occupied then-South West Africa for nearly 50 years.
The museums I have visited and the guidebooks I have read here talk extensively about the South African role in Namibia. Of course, they also talk about German heritage, still celebrated in much of the country, partly, I would (cynically) guess, because a very large proportion of the overseas visitors each year is from Germany. Even the transport museum in Windhoek is filled with SAL and SAR memorabilia. The role hasn’t always been positive. In fact, the history now (allowing, of course, for the fact that history is written by the victors), suggests that it really never was. The National Museum in Windhoek has a section dedicated to the birth of Namibia, 20 years ago this year. One of the rooms in this section remembers those Namibians who spent many, many years on Robben Island. The next, celebrating the start of independence is almost explicitly anti the former occupiers of the country – South Africa.

That Tuesday (30 Nov), while looking at a monument in a public park, I was approached by a man in a yellow T-shirt carrying a pamphlet. Would he be a religious type trying to sell me his slightly odd beliefs – it happens to me in all manner of places – or someone collecting money, I wondered with a sigh. He turned out to be the latter but the story he told me made me catch my breath.

When this gentleman, Paulo, came up to me, he greeted me in German. Perhaps my European heritage comes through more strongly than I sometimes think, perhaps the assumption is that anyone visiting this monument – to German soldiers who fell in the 1904-1907  uprising – are German. Once we’d established that I was South African and did not, in fact, speak the language, he explained why he does. Paulo grew up in East Germany. He told stories of the young children living with their parents in refugee camps in southern Angola during the 70s and 80s. Many of were Namibian families pushed from their homes by fighting between SWAPO (South West African People’s Organisation) and the SANDF (South African National Defence Force). Some were SWAPO operatives or members of civil society organisations fighting the occupation by the South Africans. Others were ordinary people, displaced by the conflict. South African soldiers fought across Northern Namibia. The government of the time denied that they were in any way active in Angola and have stuck to their story ever since, in spite of mounting evidence to the contrary. In 1978, an air-strike hit one of these refugee camps (perhaps more?). Many children were orphaned. Some were taken off to Cuba, East Germany and other countries friendly to SWAPO, were they grew up and attended school. It was more than 10 years – 1990 – before they were able to return home to Namibia, in some cases happily but in many others in a move the further traumatised and damaged them. Paulo was raising funds for a museum and a film to document and remember the stories of those orphans.

Was the situation complicated? Of course. South African farmers had settled in Namibia after the South Africans took the territory from the Germans in World War I. By 1961, when the UN finally got around to declaring the South African occupation of Namibia to be illegal, South Africa had been announcing her intention to annex the territory every year since 1947. Were there communists in Angola? Definitely. The Cuban forces were actively fighting on the side of the MPLA government to oppose the UNITA of Jonas Savimbi. They may also have been in Namibia, just as the South Africans may were probably more actively supporting UNITA than that acknowledged. It is part of the complicated history of South Africa in Southern Africa. It is a history  I know very little about and part of me wishes not to claim it, but it is part of my history and avoiding it will not help me un-know. I must learn to think of it as the other side of my country’s past.

I heard about these ‘struggle children‘ several more times during my stay in Namibia and each time I felt myself affected – unsure, a little uncomfortable, a little too close. The stories of survival and despair were not just of academic interest or touching human compassion but tapping into a range of complex and unfamiliar emotion – shame, fear, defensiveness, uncertainty, confusion, frustration. Our shared, twisted-together pasts can be overwhelming all at once but the richness of history is still important. The stories of these children, no matter how bad they might make my country look, must be told.