Freedom Fighter

I was born in Namibia, a country in southern Africa, in 1967 — at least according to my official documents. Because I was born at home, in the customary native manner, and not in the hospital, my birth was registered several years after I was born, and my true year of birth is probably 1962, although no one knows with certainty how old I really am.

My tribe, the Ovawambo, passed down stories, from generation to generation, of how our ancestors were once in Egypt, after which they traveled to a place known as Great Lake (currently identified as Tanzania or Ethiopia). Traditionally, the Ovawambo practiced circumcision and other ritual practices associated with Jews, until, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Western missionaries — who identified our tribe with the nations of Israel — put a stop to these practices and pressured my people to convert to Christianity.

While I was growing up, Namibia — then known as South West Africa — was devastated by apartheid, which my tribe resisted. Although we were not, in principle, opposed to education and progress, we refused to have the white man impose his way of life on us by ensnaring us with the carrot of his advances while at the same time trampling on us through racial segregation and discrimination.

Twice during my teenage years — in 1979, and again in 1981 — I was imprisoned for a month for protesting the inhumane treatment of blacks in what was known as the contract labor system. (In the compound where the black contract laborers were confined, no one else was allowed to enter, and the native tribes considered this a new slave trade, which they protested through various uprisings.) During these incarcerations, I was brutally interrogated, flogged, and starved.