Allow me on behalf of the entire Matali, Muyoba and Liswaniso families to clear up and bravely respond to the ongoing serious allegations levelled against our father, the late Mr Raymond Moffat Matali.
Since independence there are persisting and destructive serious allegations thrown on my father’s shoulders on the death and disappearance of our grandfather, the late Mr Brendan Kangongolo Simbwaye who was brutally killed by the South African Police Service during the fight for the liberation of our motherland.
To begin with, on 21 March 1993 at the Independence celebration held at the then Mavuluma sports ground, a group of women in the name of Katima Mulilo Swapo’s Women Council performed a drama or sketch demonstrating how our grandfather, the late Simbwaye, was brutally killed by the South African Police.
What made us family members that were present worried was that our father’s name, Raymond Moffat Matali, featured repeatedly and was used as one of the police officers who allegedly killed our grandfather.
Well we thought this was a mere sketch designed at entertaining the masses that came to celebrate, but as it is now, this sketch has seriously fuelled the ongoing allegation to an extent that some cowardly elements have since then resorted to continuously calling on NBC chat shows and Open Line programmes and writing to the electronic and print media alleging that our father is the one responsible for the death of the late Simbwaye.
More recently, an unknown coward sent an SMS to The Namibian newspaper of Friday 31 August 2007 still singing the same sour song that resulted in forcing me to resort to responding to the chronic allegations.
In the name of National reconciliation, I would need to bring this to the readers’ attention:
Yes, our father the late Mr Raymond Moffat Matali served in the then South African Police Service as a Senior Bantu Detective Constable from 1968 to 1974 and voluntarily resigned due to ill health.
Records are available at our disposal and at the Namibian Police Headquarters. The late Brendan Simbwaye Kangongolo is our late father’s uncle, for the readers’ information, as all hailed from Limbeza village, Kabbe constituency, in the Caprivi Region.
In 1992 while at our house No. 83 in Katima Mulilo, a group of seven plainclothes police officers from Windhoek whom some I can still recall as Jumbo Smit, Richard Liswaniso, the late Mr Lawrence Nchindo, and other four whose names my memory has deleted came to enquire our father’s whereabouts. Cooperatively, we directed them as the late Mr Lawrence Nchindo led them to our village which he knew well. After two hours they brought our father to Katima Mulilo.
I was very much concerned as to why the police were after our father, and as such this led me and my brother David Likando Matali to have a private word with him regarding the police presence.
He revealed to us that the police were investigating the circumstances that led to Simbwaye’s death, disappearance and his possible grave.
This exercise took the police five days in Katima and at a place commonly known as Mission, two kilometres north-east of Katima Mulilo town, trying to trace the late Simbwaye’s grave.
He further maintained he was also under investigation, as it was alleged he was involved. He assured us not to be scared as he was innocent.
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