NAMIBIA
Lauren Beaty
University of Namibia- Northern Campus
History and Cultural Preservation Project
Week One
Wa lala po, y'all….
Ok, so here's the deal- all three of us are working at the University
of Namibia's (UNAM's) Northern Campus- an offshoot of the main campus,
somewhat analogous to an American community college. It is located
over 700 km to the north in Oshakati, in a dry, sandy, rural region
just south of Angola that is home to 50% of Namibia's population
despite comprising probably less than a fourth of the country's
land. The community served by the Northern Campus is a group classified
during the colonial period as the Owambo- a grouping of linguistically
and culturally similar/ related tribes. During the colonial period,
this northern region was known for being marginalized by the colonial
governments and being the battleground for most of the independence
struggle that lasted from the 1960s through independence, finally,
in 1990. A colonial legacy of discrimination and the memory of a
long and painful independence war had left the region with little
infrastructure and few institutionalized services, particularly
in the way of education, and more than its fair share of obstacles
to development. The Northern Campus seeks to foster intellectual,
educational, and economic development, as well as community leadership,
in the region.
The Campus offers a variety of different programs. As one of our
supervisors has put it, there are two sides to what they are doing:
the academic side, and the community-oriented side. On the academic
side, the Northern Campus offers on-campus degree programs in subjects
such as nursing, business, and education. They also have a hugely
popular program that allows the many people who would like to be
involved in a course of study but who cannot attend classes on a
regular basis to study at home and come in only for testing. Besides
these academic programs, there is also what is called CEDU- the
Community Education and Development Unit, which is the umbrella
division for all of the programs in which we will be involved. CEDU
handles the Small Business Development Centre, the Access Courses
that help high school graduates improve their test scores in English
and math so they have a better chance of getting into a university,
the Career Development Centre, the Research Unit that coordinates
research in or about the northern central region of the country,
the New Leaders program that gives support and training to people
trying to develop community-based programs, and the History Research
Project. It is primarily with these last two that I will be involved.
Within the New Leaders program, I think the general idea right now
is to pair each of us with one program participant, have us do some
shadow/ follow-up work, and help to rework the functioning and administration
of the program. Most of my time will be spent on the History Research
Project, which seeks to research (duh), record, preserve, and display
the history and culture of the region. I will first be working on
collecting, editing, and archiving interviews, pictures, and artifacts.
This involves both time spent in the office and a good amount of
field trips into the villages to gather information. For example,
one day we went to an area just south of the Angolan border to visit
a traditional homestead where we took pictures and gathered information
from its owners about life at the traditional homestead, and on
Saturday, we will drive to another regional museum.
I'm not exactly sure what a typical day will be like. We spent
last week in the capital city getting familiarized with the country
and the culture and the developmental climate; visiting museums,
galleries, local development initiatives, the chamber of commerce,
etc., and since arriving in Oshakati, we have only spent a couple
of days at work. By the end of the summer, Johanna and I are expected
to produce a booklet/ guide for the exhibition the History Research
Project is sponsoring in November. This will involve gathering information
on the topic and putting together pieces of interviews, pictures,
and facts to create a cohesive story about the pre-colonial homestead.
We may also be expected to produce a draft for the History Research
Newsletter. In addition to all this, we are scheduled to help plan,
participate in, and assess other campus activities, such as a Research
and Academic Conference and an Open Forum on Community Leadership.
What have I learned? In the short time I've been here, I've learned
so much about both Namibian culture and history and the University
as a whole. I would say that half of the learning process has been
just acclimation to the culture. Johanna and I are determined to
learn the local language (we've enlisted the neighborhood kids to
help us, and we can now count to ten and say things like "How
many legs does he have?" and "I have the bubonic plague").
On Monday out of politeness I ate some fuzzy-looking rubbery inner
intestine part of some animal that tastes similar to how dirty horses
smell (and then I smiled and said "thank you"). We've
also been given the total VIP treatment through UNAM. We've met
practically everybody in charge of anything at either campus, and
here in Oshakati they've taken care to even arrange meetings just
for the purpose of having everyone at the Northern Campus meet us
and explain exactly what they do and how their position fits into
the greater scheme of things here. So far, it seems to be a well-run,
ambitious, innovative group of enthusiastic and friendly people.
Thus, in conclusion, Namibia rocks!
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Johanna Pemberton
The University of Namibia- Northern
Campus
Week One
The past week we've spent many hours in transit and then three
days in Windhoek with our supervisor, Vilho Shigwedha. We flew up
to Oshakati on Friday and this weekend we've spent getting situated
and playing with ten or twelve of the kids in our neighborhood.
It's nice coming home to a horde of kids screaming 'Johanna!' from
across the fence. It makes me feel like I'm really coming home.
(By the way, the house UNAM rented for us is really over the top.
I mean I know people in general have lots of space here because
the population is so small, but we don't know what to do with all
of the room!)
While in Windhoek we visited the National Museum of Art, the National
Museum of Namibia, the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, KAYEC (a
training center for youth in the section of town where all the blacks
in Windhoek were relocated during apartheid), UNAM's main campus,
the National Library, and the National Archives. These visits not
only gave us a crash course in Namibian history and showed us how
some exhibits have been set up, but also shocked us into seeing
how little has actually been written about Namibian history. Chin
raised his eyebrows at me when we stepped into a room in the National
Library which was said to contain a nearly complete collection of
all books on or concerning Namibia. The room was not bigger than
the main room at Camp New Hope and many of the shelves weren't even
full.
We talked to Jeremy Silvester, one of the history professors at
UNAM about teaching the subject. He's a fairly young bloke from
the UK, but he's been living in Namibia for the past six years or
so. He has lots of criticism about how the history has been written
thus far. As many histories have been written, most were from the
perspective of the colonizer in Namibia as well. The few books that
actively opposed the colonial rule, like the famous Blue Book, were
confiscated and destroyed. Jeremy wants to change history teaching
conventions altogether in his classroom. He thinks memorizing dates
to write on exams is boring and that learning history should be
a more dynamic, creative process. When his students go home on breaks,
usually to rural homesteads, they bring tape recorders to create
written history by interviewing their elders.
Vilho, the head of our History Research Project, is working with
a similar goal. He records the voices of the people of the Oshiwambo
region who would ordinarily not have "gone down in history."
So far, he's collected 270 cassettes of interviews and various other
visuals to be used in the museum. We got a tour of the campus from
Martin Ndengu on Saturday. Martin is the coordinator for the Community
Education and Development Unit at the Northern Campus. He oversees
the History Project as well as the Small Business Development Center
and various other programs like the New Leaders Program and the
Access Course for students who originally didn't get high enough
marks to get into a University. On the phone a few months ago, someone
told us jokingly that we were going to have to become fluent in
Oshiwambo our first two weeks in the country. It was most certainly
Martin. He didn't stop joking around with us the entire day. He
told Chin he was going to be in charge of the mopping and sweeping
at the office, only to be interrupted by occasional coffee pouring.
Later he told us it was as if he had known us for years. Haaveshe
is the director for the Northern Campus and we ate dinner at her
house on Saturday. They've really made us feel like "colleagues"
as they call us instead of interns.
Haaveshe explained some of the history of the campus to us at her
house. The campus was created to provide education for the northern
half of the population that lives too far to go to the main campus
in Windhoek about 8 hours away by car. They're funded primarily
by the Ford Foundation. There are three or four large main buildings
set up with classrooms, offices, a computer lab, and an interactive
television to link to the main campus so that classes can be offered
over video link. Next to this compound of buildings is an enormous
construction site building a new library for the campus. We've been
told that while Ford is willing to put in the first elevator in
the whole northern region, they aren't willing to supply money for
books. Having looked at the sparsely filled existing library room,
I wonder how they plan to fill the enormous building. It's amazing
how far the campus has come in just a few years though. One of the
VSO volunteers was telling us how, when he came less than two years
ago, none of the roads were paved. Now the main road from Ongwediva,
where we live, into Oshakati is paved and even has traffic lights
set up. Whether all of this development is "good" or "bad,"
it sure is moving quickly.
The main project Lauren and I will work on is writing the exhibition
guide for the museum. The project is called the Homestead project,
so its focus will be to document people's experiences living on
the rural farms from the precolonial time, the colonial time, and
the present day as well. A vital part of those experiences will
be stories from independence. Right now, all of the interviews are
in one of the Oshiwambo dialects. We haven't quite become fluent
yet (sarcasm guys), so someone is working to translate them into
English. The final museum will be half in Oshiwambo and half in
English. This is partly for tourists, but also for the other half
of the population that doesn't speak Oshiwambo. UNAM just gave Vilho
money for the display, so we'll also be driving out to the homesteads
to buy some "traditional and cultural" items.
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Chintan Maru
University of Namibia- Northern Campus
Week One
Walalapo, good morning,
Microenterprise development, or the economic strategy of supporting
small businesses, attempts to resolve two problems common in previous
development models. The first is the shortcoming of top-down methods
of economic development. The last few decades have shown that macro-level
approaches, while sound in theory, rarely effect a positive impact
on the most vulnerable members of our global society. Microenterprise
works at the micro-level, fighting poverty and unemployment by providing
services to struggling businesses and extending loans to those who
cannot access the conventional financial systems. The second problem
concerns development as economic aid. Giving rather than enabling
results in impermanent gains and disrespects the disadvantaged by
ignoring their capacity to provide for themselves. Microenterprise
development, on the other hand, depends on and values the hard work
and innovation of the disadvantaged.
Here at the Northern Campus of the University of Namibia, the Small
Business Development Center practices that strategy of microenterprise
development. The SBDC serves small businesses by providing training
in basic accounting and business management skills to startup or
existing businesses and offers one-on-one counseling. The SBDC also
helps individuals navigate through the complex government agency
that offers small loans for promising business plans.
Lauren, Johanna, and I spent the last week in Windhoek, so I have
not had a chance to locate my role within the SBDC yet. But I will
come to my colleagues with one premature idea: I'm interested in
focusing my RSL project on how the SBDC can identify and reach its
target population. Is it serving the people it wants to?
While in Windhoek I had the chance to gather information from the
Namibian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Namibian Economic Policy
Research Unit, and a township youth enterprise center. The three
visits provided important context for my upcoming work with the
SBDC.
What is it like to be here? South Africa and Namibia may share
a border, an intimately related history, and overlapping economies,
but my experience here has been very, very different than in South
Africa last summer. On Friday we flew (in a 16 passenger plane)
north from Windhoek to Oshakati, the commercial center of Owamboland.
There is one main road in Oshakati and everything seems to be within
half a kilometer from it. My colleague Jaime Leverett uses the term
"ribbon development' to describe the growth concentrated along
the roads. There are a couple of South African supermarkets and
fast food franchises-Nando's, Pick and Pay, Shop Rite, Wimpy's-and
there's even a KFC. Scattered between these are small homes and
businesses. There are countless cuca shops, bars that double as
convenience stores. Lauren, Johanna, and I live about 10 km from
Oshakati, in the residential town of Ongwediva. Our house there
is comfortable and spacious (I won the coin toss for the master
bedroom) but its location is very inconvenient. We have to walk
to the main road and take a fifteen-minute taxi ride to Oshakati
to go to work or to get groceries. The nearest phone also requires
a walk to the main road.
We're experiencing a draught here. There are fields of sunburnt
millet ruined by the lack of rains. In the dry warmth dust collects
on my skin turning my arms and legs an ashy gray. Besides the broad
green leaves of the marula palm, everything is a dull brown. I think
the dustiness of the land might be responsible for the unusual and
surreal sunset. The sky turns colors for what seems like a very
long 90 minutes. This place reminds me a lot of Kutch, the desert
in India where my family comes from-dry and poor, with the occasional
radiant bush of purple flowers anchored in the loose sand.
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