by Nora Chase, World Council of Churches
From the time the Germans colonized Namibia until now, women have played an important role in the liberation struggle; but as is usual with women's struggles everywhere, it does not appear in the history books. It is therefore incumbent upon us as women, when we are fortunate enough to have been an integral part of that struggle, to try to put our history on record.
Recording Women's History
When you read the history of Namibia, especially the struggle against the Germans, you will read about one of the first guerrilla fighters, Jacob Marengo; but nobody talks about his wife. He had to run away from the German colonial troops, and he had to hide in the mountains with his comrades, wife and family. She fought alongside him throughout this struggle, and on the day that the troops of specially hired assassins came closer to where they were, they shot at Jacob and injured him. His wife took the baby off her back, handed the baby to one of her daughters, took her gun and went forward. She was shot and killed. Mrs. Marengo is the first woman who participated in the armed struggle for the liberation of Namibia.
The first genocide against the people of Namibia was perpetrated by German colonial troops in the so-called Scorpion War. During the German-Herero and the German-Nama Wars, four fifths of the population was killed, mostly women of childbearing age and children. The brave Namibian women had to carry their children on their backs and drive on the older ones in their long trek through the Kalahari Desert into Botswana, where some of them are still living today. The heroines of the Namibian struggle must be remembered.
Women Triply Oppressed
Namibian women are three times oppressed: as blacks, as workers, and as women. Women are the most unemployed in all sectors of the population. Most women, especially the older ones, are sent to live in reserves, which is one-third of the arable land mass of Namibia but to which over 60% of the population has been forced to go.
We refer to those reserves as the kindergartens and the old age homes of Namibian life. Those women who can no longer work go to live in the reserves, where they take care of the children of all their children, their nieces and nephews, and workers who have never enjoyed old age pension or any type of insurance who end up in the reserves. The reserves are overpopulated and economically unviable, so you can understand the extensive duty that lies upon the women who have to eke an existence out of virtually nothing in a country where seven year periods of drought are common. They have to till the land and take care of what little cattle they have in order to get the milk and the basic maize meal to feed the children.
Despite all the laws that existed in traditional society, some of which in the matriarchates allowed the women to have some say in their lives, the South Africans have opted to take the patriarchal tribal laws and include those into the so-called South African laws of bantu (black) man and wife. In those laws, a woman never becomes a major. She is either the ward of her father or she becomes the ward of her husband or even the ward of her son. Within this extreme system of oppression, Namibian women have been prepared to get up against those odds and play their rightful role in society.
Life for Women in the Cities
Most of the women in the cities of Namibia are single parents, many of them having 2, 3, or 4 children by different by fathers. The total responsibility for feeding and educating those children lies solely on the shoulders of those women, but many are unemployed. They are forced to eke out a living by working in the service of white families, earning way below the subsistence minimum. Many of those women have to work for 4 to 5 different employers to make ends meet at all.
Very recently we have had the problem of child prostitution and drug abuse because many of the young girls look at others who are better off. It was part of the South African policy to artificially create a black middle class, which they would regard as a buffer between them and the oppressed blacks. Many children try to copy their peers from that small section of the middle class, so if money is not available in the house, they make use of the so-called changes in the apartheid system by which it is no longer a crime for a white to marry a black, becoming the child prostitute of some of the strange foreigners who came into the country. It has been very difficult to deal with those children because for them prostitution meant access to food and clothing. Tragically, it has also meant access to drugs.
What happens in the period after independence is anyone's guess. It depends on the election results. We can surmise that women will still be the slaves of Namibian society, having to take care of the children as well as the victims of long oppression and war, those who are coming as emotional and physical cripples. It depends finally on whether the women of Namibia, who form 60% plus of the population, are going to be re-active members of the society who will accept everything that is decided in their name or whether they will be active members of society and participate in the decision-making.
If women become aware of their numerical strength, they will have an integral part to play in the development of an independent Namibia and in the resettlement and rehabilitation that we will need to go through if we want to have peace, justice and democracy in our society.
This article is an excerpt from the writers' speech at the international conference on "The Role of the UN in the Peaceful Settlement of Conflict - From a Women's Perspective," 6-8 March 1989. The full report is available from International Office for Sfr. 5.
Source: Pax et Libertas, Vol 54, No.2June 1989, Published by the WILPF 1, Rue de Varembe 1211 Geneva 20, Switzerland