Making a Difference

8 Responding to the Refugee Crisis

RespondingtotheRefugeeCrisis My trip to Africa was the beginning of fifteen years running clinics and kindergartens and keeping our children happy and healthy. It was the end of my planned specialization in Paediatrics, which I now got in practice. I arrived in Lusaka, the capital city of Zambia in September 1975 on a hot Tuesday morning. My idea was to go back to Sweden and complete my specialization after three months, but I was faced with a situation from which I couldn’t walk away, so I dropped the whole idea. Coming from cold and quiet Sweden, I appreciated the hot weather. After the long flight I booked myself into a hotel and slept, only to be woken by people’s voices. Looking out of the window I saw two men, walking together side by side, but chatting at the top of their voices. After Sweden, where you don’t even flush your toilet after 10pm in order not to disturb or wake up your neighbour, here were these two men chatting and laughing at the top of their voices. I realized that I was back on African soil where we laugh and speak loudly. The Old Farm The following morning I was collected by SWAPO comrades and taken to a place called the Old Farm, where our people stayed. It was some 20 kilometres outside Lusaka. I found nurses waiting there for me, and many people, mostly from the northern part of Namibia and some from the Caprivi in the north-west of our country. A problem I hadn’t anticipated became apparent when I couldn’t communicate with them. This was due to the racial and tribal separation we were subjected to under the South African regime. Earlier I talked about the Red Line, which is the boundary between northern Namibia, where the majority of Namibia’s black people then lived, and central and southern Namibia where some other black communities and the whites lived. In the centre and south of the country, the whites had taken the land, driven the blacks into scattered arid areas, and defined those areas as African reserves, 65 Responding to the Refugee Crisis or Bantustans. Each tribe therefore lived in its own area. In the towns, black people lived in townships, each ethnic group in a different location allocated to them. This separation is why I couldn’t communicate with people from the north. For the first time, I met lots of people from Caprivi in the Old Farm. Our SWAPO Vice President Mishake Muyongo was from the Caprivi. He had a beautiful and disarming smile. He had been one of the leaders of the Caprivi African National Union (CANU), a political party that merged with SWAPO in 1964. The President of CANU was then Brendan Simbwaye and he was to become the SWAPO Vice President, but he was arrested by the South Africans and disappeared. We still don’t really know what happened to him. So Muyongo became Vice President of SWAPO. There were many compatriots from the Caprivi in SWAPO’s armed wing, the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN). I later met notable Caprivians like Greenwell Matongo, Richard Kapelwa and many others. I found them all very committed to the struggle and very nice people to work with. I liked Muyongo and worked well with him, except that he seemed to be reserved and I had a lingering feeling that deep down he was CANU first and SWAPO second. I don’t think he completely gave up on CANU. I will discuss later the serious problem of Caprivi after Independence. The reason that these Namibians, youth, women, men and children were in the Old Farm refugee camp was precisely to fight so that we could get our land back from South Africa and live together as one nation. New Challenges After Comrade Maxton Mutungulume had shown me around the camp and introduced me to my fellow Namibians I went to see the ‘clinic’, a very small dingy room, where I found a young woman in labour. I was told that this was her first baby and the process was slow. I wanted to check her status and see how many centimetres she was dilated, so I stretched out my hand to the midwife and asked for a glove, only to discover that my hand remained in mid-air. In the first place, the midwife didn’t understand my English because she spoke Oshiwambo but, luckily, one of the nurses...