PUTUSE Appolus was born in a small village called Cofimvaba in the Eastern Cape (formerly known as Transkei), South Africa, on September 23, 1930.
Her parents were subsistence farmers who, upon her finishing primary school, managed to send their youngest of 14 children to St Mathew’s College and subsequently to Lovedale College at Fort Hare, South Africa.
After matriculating at Lovedale, Appolus went to study nursing in Kwazulu-Natal, and would later go to Cape Town where she specialised in surgical nursing midwifery and other fields.
It was in Cape Town that she met the Namibian, Emil Appolus, who was in South Africa studying journalism and was part of the ‘barbershop clique’ of Namibians that would form the Ovamboland People’s Congress (OPC), the forerunner of the Ovambo People’s Organisation and later transformed into Swapo.
The two married in Keetmanshoop in 1952.
Appolus started working at a hospital in the southern town. When the couple moved to Windhoek’s Old Location later, she started working at a hospital there.
Her journalist/activist husband in 1959 was the editor of the first community newspaper published by black Namibians formed after the December 10, 1959, Old Location shootings.
According to Mathew //Gowaseb in his book ‘Triumph of Courage’, Appolus was a tacit supporter of her husband’s involvement in the mounting political movement against forced removals.
During the December shootings, 12 people were killed and more than 50 were injured, and Appolus was one of the few black nurses on nightshift that assisted those hurt in the political battle.
This act of benevolence brought her head to head with her white supervisors, and the government of the day served her with a deportation order back to Transkei.
Her husband is quoted as having said in The Namibian Weekender of February 15, 2002:
“They (the South Africa government) totally disregarded the fact that she was married and had to stay with her husband, as the South African government refused to acknowledge marriages other than those of whites.”
In late 1959, the five-month pregnant Appolus was deported to Bechuanaland (now Botswana) after she claimed that that was where she came from.
According to the couple’s daughter, Norah Appolus, husband Emil fled under the pretext that he was accompanying his pregnant wife and child.
After spending a short while in Botswana, they went to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).
The couple eventually arrived in the then Belgian Congo’s Elisabethville (now Lubumbashi) in the Katanga.
Appolus again worked at a hospital, and gave birth to a son in June 1960, the year the civil war in the Congo broke out.
“They were caught up in the civil war,” said daughter Norah. “Unable to be evacuated, they sat out the war in the ravaged town.”
During this time, Emil worked as a volunteer for the Red Cross, and a correspondent for the Daily News, while Appolus worked at the town’s hospital with a skeleton staff because most of the Belgian medical staff had fled or were being evacuated.
After the Congo war, the couple set off for Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) en route to Tanganyika (now Tanzania).
Upon arrival in Northern Rhodesia, the family was arrested by British authorities and put in prison.
On her release, Appolus fled to Tanganyika with her two small children, while her husband was deported to a Pretoria prison where he was incarcerated for six months.
Her fleeing was prompted by a message that the Zambian United National Independence Party (UNIP) would assist her to go to Tanzania.
Together with Eliazer !Gawaxab, Appolus and her two children were secretly taken to Dar es Salaam by two UNIP officials who would later become cabinet ministers of independent the Zambian government under Kenneth Kaunda.
In Dar es Salaam, Appolus started working as a matron at the Ocean Road Hospital, and with a swelling number of Namibians and South Africans finding their way there, she provided shelter to many.
Appolus became actively involved in the activities of Swapo, and as one of the only women in exile then, she became a founding member of the All-African Women’s Conference, that later became the Pan-African Women’s Organisation (Pawo) in 1962.
According to //Gowaseb, Appolus also started to travel around the world representing Swapo women.
As a member of the Swapo Central Committee, Appolus became a founding member of the Swapo Women’s Council that was formed in 1969.
In 1972, while in Zambia, Swapo delegated her to work for Pawo on a full-time basis. Appolus then gave up nursing and moved to Algiers, Algeria, where she would stay for 14 years.
In 1974, Appolus addressed the United Nations on the plight of Namibian women and children under the yoke of apartheid.
In 1986, Appolus relocated to Luanda, Angola, where she was to run the Swapo hospital at Viana, with assistance from Italy. But before she could take on this new brief, Appolus died of a stroke on October 28, 1986, while in Lusaka, Zambia.
Her remains were repatriated to Namibia last year and were re-buried at the Heroes Acre in Windhoek on Heroes Day, observed annually on August 26.