WRITING about the 23-year-long modern armed national liberation struggle waged by the gallant guerrilla fighters of the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (Plan) against the well-equipped conventional South African Defence Force (SADF) soldiers numbering many thousands who were indoctrinated in the then colonized territory, including some apartheid influenced writers, political analysts or pro-Pretoria journalists alike, who through the years had determinedly painted a negative image about Swapo’s military wing in a systematic manner aimed at demoralizing the able fighters and their highly trained and fearless regional and field commanders whose history is in the process of being recorded for posterity through research and thorough interviews.
On a planned visit to the University Teaching Hospital (UTH) in Lusaka, Zambia one Saturday afternoon in 1974, I was directed to a ward where a nurse pointed to a bed and saying: “That man over there is from Namibia,” and she then continued with her work. The 23-year-old Philemon Kondja Kambala’s eyes brightened up when he saw me approaching his bed as if to say: “I was waiting for a visitor today…” He pointed to a chair next to his bed and asked me to sit down, after which we exchanged greetings and pleasantries. When I mentioned my name to him, he responded that he knew the name from my radio commentaries through the ‘Voice of Namibia’. I handed him a paper bag with packets of Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes from Peter Nanyemba, the Secretary for Defence then based in Lusaka.
I noticed something though, he was only moving his arms and there seemed to be no movement in his lower body. As if he read my mind he quickly said: “I am paralysed from the waist down …” Nanyemba only told me that the Plan combatant was wounded in battle, but I soon got the full details after the two hours that I spent with him that first Saturday afternoon in 1974. He spent three months on his back at the UTH and I became a regular visitor, since we seemed to have agreed – “smokers of the world unite, we have nothing to lose except our lungs.” We were chain-smoking in the hospital ward!
Kambala was trained for three years in the former Soviet Union and became an artillery commander in 1974 among other military qualifications – academically, he possesses a string of qualifications plus an M.A. International Relations from the University of Keele (UK). He also became a diplomatic functionary based in Lagos, Nigeria for several years before independence.
When and where exactly was he wounded? It had happened in the Kavango Region when their platoon was ambushed by enemy soldiers in 1974. He was shot in the lower part of the body, but the enemy soldier responsible for that ‘was permanently put out of action’ by the legendary regional commander Hangenee Katjipuka and Kambala had to be carried on a stretcher for 7 days and 7 nights to Kaungamashi in Zambia’s western province. The wound became septic, but ‘the medic’ Alphonse Ngeama took care of it along the way. Let us page back to his hospital bed in Lusaka once more. Kambala had hoped, like a good soldier, that one day he would be able to walk again. He had a dream one night that he was walking – he opened his eyes that night when all the patients were fast asleep. He moved first one leg and then the other leg and miraculously he stepped out bed. He started walking, and is still walking today!
The curriculum vitae of Kambala who has been demobilized reads like a mini-Bible. From 1977 to 1978 he participated in the Western Five Contact Group Negotiations on Namibia. During the period 1988–1989 he served as Assistant Secretary to the President of Swapo and during 1990–1995 he served as the Under Secretary to President Sam Nujoma, while he became the Deputy Secretary to the President (Accounting Officer) during the period 1996 –1999. He served as Namibia’s High Commissioner to the Federal Republic of Nigeria during the period 1999–2006. In 2006 shortly before he joined the Public Service Commission as one of the commissioners, he served as Namibia’s High Commissioner to the Republic of South Africa. He achieved so much and unfortunately there’s no space for everything at the moment.
By Mvula ya Nangolo