Joshua Razikua Kaumbi
I have memories of the Sunday school teacher, teaching us about beings with helping hands and hearts – beings with white wings – who stay far away from humans but close to the source.
If I am to travel to that North Pole again and attend the same Sunday school, I will without a doubt confidently correct that teacher, because I have traversed a planet characterised by the contradiction of acceptance and rejection.
The same planet that rejects our existence would occasionally open her bosom to accept what remains of us, our remains.
The same planet whose winter takes away is succeeded by spring giving in abundance.
Whatever my winter season took from me, my spring came in the form of many strange faces.
Determined to attend tertiary education but handicapped by the registration fees, I introduced myself to a beautiful English Lady at a bookshop next to Edgars, Wernhil Park.
My attempts in the previous years were halted by a lack of just registration fees.
I knew if I could only be assisted with the registration fees, the national fund would be impressed with my first year’s marks and oblige with support for the rest of my studies. (Obiter: I have no recollection of being indebted to NSFAF). Back to my meeting.
I introduced myself as a poet or as someone who could arrange words in my unique way, having been a performing poet for Ama Poets, Brick Community Project and occasionally roped in by the Late John Pandeni to recite poetry at the founding president’s official birthday party in return for three hundred Namibian dollars.
So, I asked Jane Katjavivi for registration fees in return for reciting poetry in the open space between New Namibia Books and the City Savings and Investment Bank.
To my surprise and excitement, Jane consented and gave me an amount north of three thousand Namibian dollars. The undisciplined heart is always adventurous.
In repaying my loan, I would set up a speaker and a microphone every Saturday and recite poetry to the passers-by and subsequently started to help inside the shop, attending to her customers.
Later in the same year, Jane assisted me and my fellow poet friend, Joseph Molapong, in publishing our first poetry anthology, ‘We opened the door and saw ourselves’.
In her later years, when she was a grandmother, I would meet her at the after-school centre in Eros: me taking my son and her picking her grandchild – and I would forever introduce my son to the English Lady, who made it possible for me to attend university and would always enquire about Perivi and Isabel, her brood who had long flown the proverbial coop.
Jane is one of the many beautiful ladies who adopted Namibia in its hour of need – along with Sandra Tjitendero, Patty Geingos and the living Joan Guriras and Vicky Toivo Ya Toivo, et al., all marrying into the cause for liberation and taking up the gauntlet along with their partners to bring freedom to a people in subjugation.
The just struggle of our country did not only bring about independence but beautiful daughters of the human race married to a just struggle of a country.
A country they had not seen and whose story is yet to be told by those who…, when [they] abandoned [their] town…, knew the only thing [they] could aspire to was survival.
[They knew they] would not begin at zero but under zero. [They went] to a strange country, up north, in search of a place where thinking or feeling was not punishable by death.In this journey toward life and freedom, the exiled had to distinguish between two paths: one that leads to survival and the one that leads to death.
It is a vital choice – the same one that individuals, cultures and nations must also make if they wish to advance and not become extinct (Cesar Vidal).
That choice beckons us once more as a nation.
Thank you for teaching me to live with compassion, to see every fight for justice as my own, to give without seeking in return, and to see the endless possibilities represented by the youth and this beautiful and subdued country, whose beauty and spirit mirrored your own.
Above all, thank you for rising to meet a desperate stranger’s hand with your bottomless generosity and mindfulness, which you shared with everyone you met in this land once strange to you but now your eternal resting place of
choice.
Jane Katjavivi’s spirit saw the beauty of the galaxy – and like an undisciplined heart, escape betrayed her body up the sky to massage the galaxy.
She died on 9 August 2022 whilst a flight back to Namibia.
Goodbye England’s rose, whose aroma and scent will forever engulf our land.