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About Mondesa
A Day in Gobabis
by Robert Mellis
Christof Maletsky and I bundled into our Jetta and drove 200
kilometers east just after dawn to cattle country, for a meeting with
a lawyer and a white farmer who is in conflict with his farm workers.
He is trying to evict them because he has sold his farm to someone who
insists that they be evicted as part of the deal.
Five kilometers out of Gobabis, where we were to meet, Christof called
the lawyer's office to check directions. The meeting had been called
off, thank you for phoning. But we are not going to meet with the
press, he was told.
Mmmm. Nothing quite so fine as driving across this land (even though
we passed giraffe, kudo, ostrich, warthogs, springbok) to have the
door slammed in our face.
I suggested we stop by the Nampa office. This is the state-sponsored
news agency and it has generally incompetent reporters in most of the
medium-sized towns. We thought we might chat and find if there were
any stories we should look into since we had driven so far.
The Nampa reporter was worthless, clueless and brainless. But Christof
ran into a SWAPO (governing party) functionary named Castro and he
gave us a tip after making fun of The Namibian as a "sensationalist"
newspaper. He told us to stop off on our way home at the little town
of Omitara. He said we would find a settlement which has been promised
electricity for three years. The wires are in, the circuit boxes are
installed. But there is no connection to the electrical grid.
Before we headed out of Gobabis, we went with the SWAPO guy to the
agricultural fair in town to look at the animals. Lots of good-looking
cattle were in pens or being paraded in the ring.
Fat white farmers stood around eying the cattle and judging. Christof
introduced me to a handsome black man, a Herero, wearing expensive
clothes. He is a former member of parliament who was ousted and now
has taken up farming. His blackness stood out in this very white
place. I shook his hand and commented that the fair seemed awfully
white. He laughed with his luminous white teeth against the blackness
of his skin and said, "The whites judge white cattle and blacks judge
black cattle." I looked at him in astonishment and said, "I only see
cattle. I don't see black and white cattle." He liked that and I asked
how many black farmers were at the show. Only one, he told me with the
same laughter on his face. Ah. So who judges your cattle, I asked,
thinking he had to be a winner. "I submit my cattle to the judgment of
the white judges," he said.
I liked this man, his openness and willingness to chat. So I asked him
how many head of cattle he owns. Oh, boy. Did I put my foot in it! He
turned and looked at me and said, "That is an impertinent question to
ask of a Herero. When you ask that, it is the same as asking how much
money I have in my wallet." Oh-oh! I apologized for my insensitivity
but he made light of it.
"There are many farmers who might have 1,600 head of cattle. But they
have mortgages on the cattle and the farm. And there are farmers who
might have 300 head of cattle but it is free and clear. That is
wealth." Then he smiled again and told me he has 400 head of cattle
free and clear. This is just another example of how the barriers come
down when people feel you are interested in them. I have experienced
this so many times in Namibia.
We also stumbled upon another little story when we saw a cluster of
pretty little kids watching the bulls and cows being paraded in the
ring. They were all drawing pictures of the cattle. We learned from
the SWAPO guy these are street kids that have been taken in by a
retired Dutch woman named Lyni Venema. She feeds them and teaches them
social skills so they can be integrated back into society. I
photographed them and they squealed with delight when I showed them
the digital pictures.
I promised to send Lyni some prints of the pictures. I also asked one
of the kids named Desiree for her picture because it was so cute.
Desiree wrote her name at the bottom: eeriseD. Like many malnurished
kids, she has dyslexia. I'm attaching Desiree's picture of the cows
and bulls. I'll upload additional pix to the 2005 Namibia picture
album.
We drove out of town and found the little settlement (that's the local
name for squatter camps) and pulled up to the electrical box. I
switched on the circuit breakers, hoping that someone just didn't
understand that your needed to activate the circuit. But the street
lights that had been installed remained unlit. And there were no other
sparks.
We strolled across the sand to a wrinkled, gnarled fellow with massive
hands. He and Christof started chatting in the click language. (Christof
speaks, reads and writes in English, Damara-Nama (click), Afrikaans.
And he can understand the Windhoek dialect of Oshiwambo and a fair
amount of Herero.) This old fellow with his blue-black face and tired
eyes spoke about the broken promises of the government. It turned out
he was the head of the committee that the settlement formed to get
electricity into the place.
He told us without electricity the settlement people must go out and
forage for wood so they can cook. There is no wood in sight except for
a few gnarly trees that don't provide any shade. He said area farmers
claim they are thieves because the people go on the farmland in the
night and take the wood for their fires. I asked how far they would
have to walk to find wood that would not involve trespassing. He
rolled his eyes. It is farther than we can walk in a day, he said.
He told of the poverty of the community. "The children go to bed
hungry every night," he said in click. "They wake up hungry. And they
go to the school in the settlement so they will be fed." He said the
school gets bags of meal from which they cook a porridge called meally-pap.
The school, a series of building with metal roofs stood behind us and
had its own generator which was clanking away.
I asked the man if he or any of the people in the settlement have work
they can do? "No one has any work," he told me. I asked how he would
be able to pay for the electricity when it finally is connected? "Ah.
The regional council chief has promised us work at a fish farm that
the government wants to start at the dam," he said. But he shrugged in
disgust. It is just more unfulfilled promises.
I was struggling to get my arms around the enormity of the problems
they face. How do you wake up in the morning, beside you wife, and
look at the day ahead when you have no work, no money? I asked him.
"He became very agitated and clicked away to Christof who translated.
"I wake up and it is like I am in a deep hole," he said. "I cannot get
out of this hole day after day after day." We asked to photograph him
by the useless circuit breaker box and we promised we would try to get
action from the regional councillor.
On our way out of the settlement, I suggested to Christof that we stop
by the school to see what life is like.
He chatted in Afrikaans to the school secretary who came out of her
little house (rent-free, she told us). She wasn't too helpful but the
headmistress, a 40-something woman named Rebecca Jeremiah, came
wandering over to see who the outsiders were. She spoke good English
and told about getting meal from a non-government organisation as part
of the country's drought relief program.
"They deliver 65 sack of meal each month. But our 258 children use
70-80 sacks of meal each month," she told me. Before we run out, I
water the meally-pap. When we run out of meally-pap they children stop
coming to school. When they come each day with hungry stomachs they
are very unruly," she said.
Mrs. Jeremiah used to be a teacher in Windhoek where her children and
husband live. But the Ministry of Education transferred her to this
tiny settlement 110 kilometers from her home. She has a small house
beside the school. But she told us she lives for Fridays when she can
drive home to Windhoek.
She told me she feels she was called to be a teacher. She is not doing
it for the money. She works because she wants to see the children
grow.
But how can they grow intellectually when these youngsters are living
on meally-pap, I wanted to know. She sagged visibly and agreed. She
said many of the seventh graders in her school still cannot read.
New Namibian pictures are at:
http://photos.yahoo.com/robertsmellis
Sailing story at:
http://www.sailnet.com/collections/articles/index.cfm?articleid=ouread0018
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