FROM today New Era will publish excerpts from the momoirs of Dr Libertina Inaviposa Amathila. Dr Amathila is adamant in her book, ‘Making a Difference’, that the work is neither an autobiography as such nor is it about the political history of Namibia, but a story about herself and how she contributed to the struggle for independence. Libertina Inaviposa Amathila (née Appolus), was born on 10 December 1940 in Fransfontein Kunene Region and became the first black woman medical doctor in exile. After independence, Dr Amathila was the first Cabinet Minister of Local Government, went on to hold the position of Minister of Health and before her retirement was the first woman Deputy Prime Minister of the Republic of Namibia. She decided to write the memoirs “to share my story with young women from Namibia, who want to do something but who may think it is difficult or this is only for boys or that it will take too long. I wanted to encourage them that nothing is insurmountable: all it needs and takes is the will to do it, the focus, the determination, courage and discipline, and then go for it.” This is her story.
Early childhood
I RAN to my grandmother out of breath and shouted, ‘Grandma, the teachers can also kaka, yes, I saw my teacher with my own eyes.’ I saw him going to the bush and I couldn’t believe my eyes, because the direction he was taking was where village people went to kaka and I decided to follow and to see what a teacher was doing there. I even went to where he was behind a big mopane tree and there was this big kaka he had made.
My grandmother was not amused. In the first place, I had no business to follow grown-ups. Secondly, how stupid was I to think that teachers don’t relieve themselves since they are people like us. I said: ‘But, grandmother, they are so clean, I thought they don’t do such smelly things.’
That was the life of a real village girl. I was five or six years old and I still remember the incident. Later, as I grew up, I discovered that I was not alone in that trend of thought: my age mates also wondered about many things. We grew up in the era when children were to be seen but not heard. There were many things we didn’t understand.
Let me explain about the teachers of my childhood. They were the most respected members of the community. They were always neatly dressed, always wearing a tie. Amongst them was my elder brother, Phillipus, whom I loved and admired. He was a violinist, a singer and very well dressed. He was one of the first teachers from my family and village. Later my sister became one of the first woman teachers; she was not a musician, but she was a good teacher. In my village school, our teachers did not beat us. If a child didn’t come to school the teacher would go to the home of that child to check why the child had not come. It wasn’t possible to play truant and get away with it, as the teacher would come and report you to your parents.
Fransfontein is in the Kunene Region. It has a church built in 1906, a school, a big garden and a fountain that was the lifeline of the village. It also had a police station, though I never understand why there was a police station in such a small village with no crime. This was where the contract labourers were sent for punishment by their farm bosses who didn’t pay them for their labour. At the end of the contract, when the contract workers should have received their year-end payment, they were often sent to the police on the pretext of their having committed a crime and beaten up by the police and sent back to their bosses to work and they wouldn’t receive any payment for the year they had worked.
When I was growing up in Fransfontein, it was a tradition or a lifestyle that children stayed with their grandparents until they were ready to start real school. I started to follow my big sisters to school at the age of five, but during winter I was grounded. I stayed at home with my grandmother who didn’t let me go to school because of the cold weather. During winter it could be minus 2 or 3 degrees centigrade, so I stayed in the warm bed which I shared with my grandmother. Our blankets were made of karakul sheep skin. I went back to school only when the weather improved.
In those days we actually went to pre-school, but it was not called pre-school then. We used slates and wrote with chalk; we didn’t have books. The first class at our school was Klein (small) A, followed by Groot (big) A and then Groot B. I attended all those classes in Fransfontein and only started real school in Otjiwarongo.