INTERNATIONALLY known Austrian psychotherapist Sigmund Freud will certainly not twist or turn in his grave, but start dancing to the popular Oshiwambo cultural beat when he learns that my grandmother believed that if a child is born in an urban area, he or she will never look back to the norms of the village but become accustomed – become a city slicker, lost, no longer know what our ancestors practised and she said this on receiving the news that my mother was four months pregnant in the southern town formerly known as Lüderitz 70 years ago.
Grandmother had based her ‘pseudo-analysis’ on my two elder brothers, one born in Windhoek and the second one in the afore-mentioned town. Grandmother convinced her last born, Nangombe, my mother – to temporarily relocate to the village where she would surrender herself to the overall care of her mother and the experienced village midwives for regular prenatal check-ups. My mother used to tell me when I was growing up that grandmother often talked about nature and culture, confining herself to ethnic areas that she had visited and where she lived till she died before I really had the opportunity to know her better, and learn from what she knew. That however brings me to what I had read during my lifetime.
Confucius, talking about Who We Are and What We Know said the following: “To arrive at understanding from being one’s true self is called nature. To arrive at being one’s true self from understanding is called culture.” It seems we all learn in two ongoing ways; being who we are helps us know more about this life, and what we learn helps us be who we are. If for instance we look at how we move though our days, we can clearly see we are all made of different mixtures of nature and culture. As a boy, being mischievous, I burnt my left hand and the pain was unbearable and that made me understand the dangers of fire and heat as most children always do. In one of Mark Nepo’s books namely “The Book of Awakening,” I read somewhere that: “When experience is the teacher, I am a child of nature.” As a teenager, he says: “I listen to others about their failures in love and this knowing shapes how I try.”
Africa like other parts of the world has given birth to great thinkers – some have been recorded through the written word, others however, their constructive thoughts are known through the spoken word only. The writings of Nepo are very instructive indeed as we may read for ourselves: “As birds fly and molt, as spiders spin and trap, as snakes slither and shed, humans care and know. And as the bird can’t find much to do with its fallen feathers, as the spider spins and gets stuck in its web, as the snake ignores its already forgotten skin, we are left with our knowledge, intent that it be useful.” But the use, we are told, is in the caring. There are no doubt stories plus wisdom unrecorded from the rural areas – in the scattered villages and among the ageing wise men and women.
• Mvula ya Nangolo a Namibian author, journalist and poet also serves as Special Advisor to the Minister of Information and Communication Technology in Windhoek.
BY Mvula ya Nangolo