Kevin Toolis went to Namibia in 1987, an idealistic rookie journalist eager to join the struggle against apartheid. He was deported. Ten years later he returned
We were driving south along the thin, two- lane road that runs through Ovamboland, the former war zone in northern Namibia, when we saw something ahead shimmering like a red mirage. We had been to see what remained of the white citadel of Oshakati after its inhabitants had fled, its lawns withered into dust, and its sand-bagged bunkers fallen into collapse.
My partner Dea, beside me, began screaming: “It’s a person, it’s a person.” It was a girl dressed in a red shirt lying as if asleep on the southbound lane of the highway. I braked hard and steered around her stopping the car 20m beyond. I ran back.
She was about 12, barefoot, lying stretched out across the lane. There was no one else around. We were in the middle of nowhere in a tribal homeland that had nothing but villages in the bush.
Her head was oozing blood, congealed matter from the underside, where it made contact with the tarmac. It was already a thick, bloody, murky, gelatinous mass. Her eyes were far back in her head and she was emitting an animal rasping choking.
And there were tiny bloody scrapes on her legs that had been inflicted by the mysterious thing – a car or, perhaps, the lorry that she had fallen from – that had caused this terrible event.
Beneath her body lay a small stick – she was a shepherd girl who had been sent out as evening descended to round up the family’s goats or cattle. Her lungs were gurgling. She was dying.
Some small boys appeared 150m away and I called to them. Other children appeared. They drew closer, perhaps surprised to see boers – whites – on the road, but they were soon mesmerised by this dying thing on the ground which they stared at as if looking at a broken cow.
I asked: “Is there a hospital nearby?” But everyone spoke Oshiwambo, the local language.
I flagged down the first passing car and by now a small group had gathered. The driver got out and said in perfect, but stilted English: “What exactly has happened here?”
“There has been an accident. We found her lying in the road,” I answered.
But already I felt guilty. Our car, with its hazard lights flashing, was 20m beyond the girl. There were no witnesses. Did they think we had knocked her down? That the boers had killed the girl? “Where is the nearest hospital?”
In Europe, there always would be a hospital, emergency services. I kept thinking of the BBC999 programme. But this was Africa. The crowd, far from being energised, seemed hopeless. Every question we asked seemed to provoke incomprehension.
“Eight kilometres back,” someone said. Another member of the crowd pointed in the opposite direction. “No, no, no, in Oshakati,” said another. Oshakati was 180km behind us. They fell to arguing among themselves in a language that we had no comprehension of.
“She needs an ambulance. What about a phone?”
“Eight kilometres.”
We decided to leave to find a phone. We could not take responsibility for the dying girl – we could do nothing. We had no idea who she was, where her family was, where we were or how to find help. Nor was there any possibility of explaining what we were doing.
We drove south for five, 10, 20km. There was nothing, and then we hit a strip of cuca shops – bars. We pulled into a bar, a stable really, to use the telephone. It was a simple concrete shed, surreally filled with men and women, smartly dressed, nightclub-style, drinking huge bottles of beer in the middle of the afternoon.
They were amazed to see us. The whole bar turned to stare as these panicky boers ran in and demanded to use the telephone. We told them there had been an accident. We asked for the number of the local hospital.
No one could agree on the number or the location of the hospital. Someone shouted out a number and I called it. The operator spoke only Oshiwambo. It was hopeless.
A woman in the bar spoke reasonably good English, and with her help I finally got through to another hospital and spoke to the ambulance dispatcher: “I want to report an accident.”
“Has the car overturned? he asked.
“No, there was no car, it was just a person.”
“Was the car damaged?”
“No, no, it was a person …” I searched for the word to describe the little shepherd girl in the bush. “A pedestrian.” It seemed ludicrous.
“Ah, a pedestrian,” the dispatcher repeated phonetically, the way one repeats a word in an unintelligible foreign language. “And how many people were injured in the car, sir?”
“No, no, it was a child, a girl.”
“And you are?”
I spelt out my name as, on the other side of the phone, he filled in the form.
“And where are you calling from?”
“We are at … Ontwepi …” Already I felt the correct pronunciation of the village slipping from me.
“And you are calling from, sir?”
“A public telephone.”
“Ah, a public telephone,” in a tone that implied that this was the answer to the mystery of who I was and what I was reporting. He hurriedly brought the conversation to a close. “Well, yes, thank you. I am sure we will send something.”
I put the phone down and turned towards the room. The whole bar was staring at me.
In a gesture of what I thought was superfluous politeness, I asked the bar owner how much I owed her for the calls – expecting her to dismiss it.
“Eight dollars,” came the cold reply.
Eight Namibian dollars was about two rand – the call could have cost R1,05 at the most – but I was too stunned by her reply to think. I slowly counted out the money in change and then we left.
We drove south in silence for a long time. Despite my time in Namibia and the friends I had made, there was no closing the chasm of difference evident at that moment. I felt completely out of place. No amount of “white solidarity” was going to change that. We were absolute strangers here.
In reality, as we later discovered, there were no ambulances unless you were knocked over outside the regional hospital. An “accident” in Ovamboland meant a collision of one of the packed mini-vans, crammed with 20 or so migrants returning from the distant south. The death toll was usually nine or more.
Anything less was just a hazard of everyday life, like the drought or the murderous boers – who, during the war, killed with impunity and asked questions later. Cows, animals, children were constantly being killed on the road. And even if there was an ambulance, the girl stood little chance of survival outside a hi-tech Western neurological unit.
From somewhere I remembered a quote from a South African conscript describing the war in Namibia: “If you knew about the north, you would know how fucking worthless a human life can be.” The absence of war in 1997 did not change that truth.
That night, we returned to a new five-star hotel full of European tourists who had come to see the “real wilderness” of Namibia.
The food – flown in by cargo plane – tasted like ashes in our mouths. It was hard to eat, hard to forget that a little girl was lying dead in a simple hut 150km to the north, a world away from this extravaganza.
Swapo was founded in the early Sixties, and its leaders spent almost 30 years exiled from the country they now govern. Standing before their fervent supporters at the United Nations and at west European anti- apartheid conferences, Swapo and its leader Sam Nujoma were liberators, brave fighters struggling against impossible odds. Nujoma was never a great public speaker, but he was always received with the adulation usually accorded a rockstar.
In private, the movement’s leaders spent most of their lives engaged in vicious internal power struggles in various refugee camps in Angola and Zambia. During its long exile, Swapo turned in on itself. The “Old Guard” of Nujoma and his cronies, who founded the movement, placed their own political survival above all other considerations.
They were politically and militarily inept, personally corrupt and intolerant of the younger waves of activists who fled into exile after them. Swapo’s incursions into northern Namibia were often little more than suicide missions.
In the early Eighties, Swapo’s long-term failure provoked a witch-hunt among its ranks for South African spies that soon blossomed into a full-scale, Stalinist- style purge. Under the eyes of the UN, which was basically underwriting Swapo’s finances, thousands of exiled Namibians were arrested in Angola and Zambia and tortured by Swapo’s security unit.
Anyone who was a non-Ovambo was automatically suspected, and the tentacles of suspicion reached as far as the Namibian refugee communities in Sweden, the United States and Britain. It was an ethnic purge that claimed between 800 and 2 500 lives. Some of the brightest and best of Namibia’s young people were among them, killed not for opposing apartheid but for dissenting from the autocratic rule of Nujoma.
It was a terrible crime, and the blood on the hands of the current Swapo leadership is still unacknowledged. It is the great taboo of contemporary politics in Namibia. In May, the Namibian government refused to allow South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission to hold hearings in Namibia about the crimes of the apartheid era for fear that the atrocities of their own prison camps would feature on the agenda.
Swapo’s chief torturer, Salomon “Jesus” Hawala, is now head of the Namibian Armed Forces. The chief public apologists for the treatment of the “dissidents” are Minister of Trade Hidipo Hamutenya and Minister of Foreign Affairs Theo-Ben Gurirab. And, of course, Sam Nujoma himself.
Word of these purges began to reach the outside world in 1985 through the testimony of the parents of the refugees who had been killed or tortured by Swapo. I was in Namibia when the Namibian newspaper carried the first stories, and the leadership’s thin explanation for them as the rooting out of “South African spies”.
I remember not believing Swapo, but I also remember disbelieving the parents, whom I regarded as creatures of the transitional government. In reality, the parents were telling the truth and Swapo was lying through its teeth. But I was on the side of Swapo and, like Swapo’s sponsors in the churches and at the UN, refused to believe that our heroes were capable of such cruelties.
And because it challenged that simple axiom we had: black equals good, white equals bad. We wanted our simple dream.
In power, Nujoma is not much different than in exile. Probably because of his insecurity, he travels in a cavalcade of four black armoured Mercedes with screaming sirens and motorcycle outriders, regardless of how short the journey. He is fond of presenting himself as an important African potentate.
And fond, too, of expensive presidential jets that his impoverished country can ill- afford. A squad of goons clad in Hawaiian shirts, with guns in their waistbands, follow his every move.
Nujoma’s natural authoritarianism is currently reined in by a democratic Constitution, Bills of Rights and the best legal formulas that the UN lawyers could contrive. But Swapo is the ruling party and there is no credible opposition. Nor is there any tradition of democratic opposition within Swapo. The government has been plagued by embarrassing corruption stories that reach all the way into the president’s office.
It is easy to be cynical and say that, in comparison with other African governments, Swapo is not that bad, but the people who suffer from Swapo’s corruption are the Namibian poor.
Ironically, The Namibian is still the leading opposition newspaper, but now it is being castigated for its “alien values” and its editor, still Gwen Lister, is bitterly criticised by her one-time political allies.
The last man I went to visit in Namibia was Brigadier Tomas Tomasse, one-time head of the security police and the man ultimately responsible for throwing me out.
A black colleague and I had interviewed him in 1986 in an attempt to find out the names of men such as Severmus Siteketa who were being held in detention. Tomasse had toyed with us, trying to out-stare us, trying to blackmail my workmate into becoming an informer. At the time, he was genuinely frightening.
On one level, I now wanted to see him to discover more about my expulsion, but the real reason was that I wanted to see if he was diminished.
Tomasse is notorious in Namibia as the personal interrogator/torturer of the current Namibian ambassador to Zimbabwe, Thomas Kamati. In one of the ironies of political revolution, Tomasse later reported to Kamati just after majority rule was established. Their first encounter is legendary.
Kamati: “Do you remember me?”
Tomasse: “Of course, I remember you.” And then Tomasse was silent.
Tomasse gives the lie to the idea that bad guys are cowards. When I asked him about the Kamati incident he did not flinch.
“It was my profession. There were the laws laid down. That is what I did. I personally interrogated him.” He reminded me of the torturer-priest Father Beron in Conrad’s Nostromo, who was always personally disappointed in the refusal of his charges to give a complete confession. Those with a “bad disposition” would be taken outside to be beaten senseless and then Beron, in a pitiless, monotonous tone, would ask: “Will you confess now?”
Unlike most of his underlings, Tomasse did not flee. The incoming government made it clear that there would be no retribution. Tomasse, who was born in Namibia, stayed. He was even briefly promoted to major- general of the Namibian police – the top police position in the country.
I met him in his house. He had retired, but there was something in his manner, the way he obsessively and meticulously smoothed and stretched a cloth on the desk in front of him, that remained frightening even though his powers to interrogate had long since disappeared. The wall of his den was littered with his awards for meritorious conduct against the enemies of apartheid.
Physically, Tomasse remained impressive, but his answers to my questions were wearily predictable. Independence was terrible, Swapo did nothing right, the country was going to the dogs, corruption was everywhere.
His main grievance seemed to be that the cutlery from the luxurious chalets built for white campers in the country’s national parks had been stolen. Less than 8km from where we sat, 2 000 black squatters were living in cardboard hovels devoid of water or sanitation.
I asked pointblank what did he think he had been fighting for. But there were no answers. “I believed that the war would come to an end and that South Africa would win the war and that the South West [Namibia] would be independent but not under black rule.”
But blacks outnumbered whites 15 to one – how could Tomasse not see that the whites were always going to lose? I left no wiser.
Namibia had changed. Despite the blood on its hands, the non-racist Swapo government did offer hope of a better future for the Namibian people. And there is no alternative. But I had changed too. I am 38 now and it was no longer possible to believe so unconditionally in a cause, in heroes and absolute human goodness. My dreams have changed irrevocably.
The days I enjoyed the most on this journey of return were when we drove alone through the endless Namibian landscape of desert and mountains. The purple, yellow earth, the shimmering iron mountains in the distance, were untouched by these human hatreds, these human failures, and it was easier to believe that it was possible to start anew and leave the bitter past behind.
We were right: apartheid was slavery, but my generation’s dream of an easy freedom in Southern Africa was impossible. Its absolute colour scheme – black equals good, white equals bad – was too simple for the real world and the real flawed human beings who inhabit it. It was just that, a dream.
Kevin Toolis is the author of Rebel Hearts, a book about the IRA, published by Picador