Making a Difference

17 Urban Renewal

UrbanRenewal Katutura Facelift I found that, as Minister, I was required to approve the projects the municipalities were embarking on, so I used that privilege and decided that Katutura needed a serious facelift, and urgently. I told the Windhoek Municipality that I wouldn’t approve any request for improvement in the city until Katutura was taken care of. Katutura was a dustbowl and tuberculosis was rampant there. The housing shortage was huge and nothing had been done to improve the condition of the people. There had been housing projects in the 1950s and from 1959 on people had been forcibly moved into matchbox houses there. However, in Katutura and other townships, no new housing projects had been undertaken for 30 years or so. Katutura needed a facelift and the first task was to tar the dusty streets and provide streetlights. Some of our white brothers had a serious lack of knowledge of their own countrymen and women who are black. When I mentioned the need to provide streetlights for the dark streets of Katutura, they expressed their fears that the black people would vandalize the lights, by throwing stones and breaking the bulbs. Therefore it was suggested that it would be better to install high mass lights that would be too high to be damaged by stones. I replied that anyone who attempted to throw stones at the street lights must be crazy and I hadn’t seen crazy people on the streets of Katutura. I can’t imagine grown men spending time throwing stones at the bulbs and the children couldn’t reach that high. Therefore, I argued, normal street lights should be installed. The township would look nice with normal street lights and people living there would appreciate it. I was imagining living under those large, extremely bright high mass lights, as if Katutura was a huge prison. How would the residents ever sleep? I didn’t create a scene since I knew that these demeaning ideas were the result of the apartheid system that had dehumanized black people Making a Difference 138 in the eyes of the whites, who have built a picture of blacks as savages, not to be trusted with anything normal, but today white people walk around in Katutura with no problem. I explained my objection to the high mass lights and told them that after the facelift, Katutura’s main street would be an extension of Independence Avenue and should have the same street lights throughout. The work of tarring the streets started in earnest. I sat on the tractor to launch the programme, wearing my high-heeled shoes (this was noticed by one of the newsmen). The work progressed very well and was completed after a few months. There were lots of complaints from taxi drivers who had to drop their customers far away because of the temporary closure of some streets. One business woman was very vocal, moaning that she was losing customers owing to the street closures, and she even suggested that the work be stopped. But I quickly learned that humans like complaining, particularly Namibians who like to complain about anything you do, but once the project is completed, they are very happy. On ‘D-day’ in 1992, when work had finished, I invited the whole Government and all the members of the diplomatic corps to see the beautiful refurbished township. The police brass band entertained the guests, speeches were delivered, and it was an unforgettable day for me. Each Minister, the Mayor of Windhoek, and members of the diplomatic corps, planted trees all along the Katutura’s Independence Avenue. I planted my palm tree in the middle of the roundabout. It’s big now and I see it every time I drive to Katutura. The other trees, although still there, show they are not taken care of; some have died while others are not growing as they should. That is the Katutura we see today, which is a beautiful place with lot of businesses. In fact you don’t need to go to the city for shopping, everything is now available in Katutura. Communal Towns There were big towns in the communal areas that also needed to be developed and for that they first needed to be proclaimed as towns, which was a daunting task. The process of proclaiming a town could take about two years, I was told. Since these towns were built without much planning, there were homesteads dotted amongst the town houses, so we had...