Isabel Bento

KARIBIB – “She was a very quiet and soft-spoken person with a smile on her face at all times, and rarely expressed anger. This is why what happened to her is most painful to me.”

This is how Loide ǂNauses described her younger sister, 23-year-old Josephine ǂNauses, who was recently killed in a tragic fire incident at
Karibib’s Usab informal settlement, along with her two minor children.

An emotional and also soft-spoken Loide described her deceased sister as a fighter who did what she could to sustain herself, and who always knew how to share with her sisters and family.

“This reflected how I raised them – that they must always stand together and rely on each other. I did so for the day I would no longer be here, and I could see that Josephine was beginning to be a reflection of those teachings,” she told Nampa in an interview.

Loide, who is the second of nine children,
narrated how she had to raise Josephine and her
other siblings after their mother died when Josephine was only 13 years old.

“I have served as a mother and father throughout her life, as well as a grandmother to her children. This makes everything so extremely painful, especially for the little children whom I held with my own hands when they were born. But there is nothing I can do now; I leave everything in the hands of the Almighty,” she continued. Josephine’s aunt, Roseline Garises, said the death of the three family members was a tragedy.

“We suffered significant losses as a family. We lost three women from the same family. We looked forward to seeing these children grow up, seeing what their future would be like, and how they would one day care for the family,” she narrated.

Josephine and her children Regina ǂNauses and Loide ǂNauses died alongside her boyfriend, who reportedly set the shack they were all in, alight, causing all four of them to die.

The victim’s deceased boyfriend, who was identified as 25-year-old Mandela Afrikaner Mbaunguraije, who also fathered the three-year-old Loide,
allegedly broke into his girlfriend’s shack, and proceeded to set it on fire while preventing the victims from escaping.

The two reportedly had relationship issues, which led Josephine to ask for both the family and police’s intervention.

The police said the matter was attended to by the town’s police, and it was resolved that the boyfriend should remove his belongings from her shack,
which he did. He also promised not to return to the residence after a police warning.

On Sunday at about 06h00, Josephine, however, called her sister, who lived a few metres from her, telling her that her boyfriend, who had just returned from Okahandja that day, had broken into her shack.

When her sister arrived at the scene, she found that the entrance to the shack, which was already on fire at that time, had been blocked with a bed to prevent the victims from escaping and not to allow anyone from entering too. -Nampa