Nahas Angula, Namibia’s first Education Minister, speaks to Gareth Simpson
For many countries providing education to meet the needs of its people is a struggle at the best of times. But how do you cope when your country is oppressed by apartheid, you are fighting a liberation war, thousands of your people are displaced in refugee camps and your country’s education system is designed to divide and not unite?
That was the challenge for Nahas Angula, Namibia’s first Education Minister. Here he tells how his missionary education inspired him to develop the South West Africa People’s Organisation’s (Swapo) underground education system that contributed so much to Namibia’s liberation in 1990 and stable governance ever since.
“Where do I start? That was my reaction when I was asked to establish the first Namibian school in exile. But I thought back to my missionary school – to the Finnish women who had come to northern Namibia, a strange place for them, and provided my own education. I asked myself ‘Why can’t I do the same thing for exiled children?’
That was in 1973. Families had been displaced from north-eastern Namibia since 1968 and Swapo’s refugee camp in Zambia was filling up. We had to respond to the needs of Namibians outside of the country. South Africa’s oppression of Namibia was intensifying and we were fighting an armed struggle.
When I started we had nothing so I taught under a tree. Eventually I painted some cupboards and used them for walls and a mechanic constructed a roof – of sorts! A Zambian friend of mine used to supply chalk. And that was the school.
I arrived in Zambia as a young man and studied at the African-American Institute. The Cold War meant that America was keen to fund many Africans to study there to stop us studying in the Eastern Europe! But I benefited from that, and went on to study Education at the University of Zambia and became involved with Swapo.
We all knew that education was critical for the liberation of Namibia. Apartheid education was dehumanising, manipulating and divisive. We wanted to provide people with the confidence to take part in the struggle and to be prepared for the day Namibia was independent. The school was the first step in that process.
By the late 1970s the number of people displaced from Namibia was increasing so we established more camps and schools in Angola. But Angola proved to be a difficult place for us. The South Africans were in and out and more than 600 Namibians were killed when the camps were bombed.
Security was paramount, so in future schools were established out of reach of the South Africans, primarily in Congo Brazzaville. But all the schooling was on and off because of the threat of South African attack, if we heard rumours of possible attacks our teaching was disrupted.
I became Swapo Secretary of Education and Culture in 1981. By this point almost everybody was benefiting from the Swapo education and, in effect, we were running a Government outside of our own country. There were 20,000 people in the formal system but we also used to provide non-formal literacy classes for combatants and others.
In Namibia we were backing resistance community schools that taught in English. Teachers in the government schools were encouraged to teach about Namibian and African history to undermine the credibility of the system. They did this informally and illegally after class and were supported by the Council of Churches, who also ran small centres for those wanting an ‘alternative’ education to South Africa’s. Many of the children who learnt this way joined the armed struggle that eventually overthrew the South Africans.
In exile we diversified the kind of education we were providing for Namibians to meet the needs we foresaw. We knew that independence would come, but the armed struggle was still developing. So whilst we were training today’s ambassadors, ministers and permanent secretaries in public administration we were also providing combatants with engineering and other technical skills to be better prepared for the guerrilla war.
The struggle was tragic in itself, but it also gave us a chance to prepare for an independent Namibia. In our school in Congo Brazzaville we piloted possible education systems to reform Bantu education. We took ideas from English speaking Africa and from around the world
People joke that if South Africa had wanted to maintain control over Namibia it could have given independence a long time ago because we were not prepared. They could have been in-control forever! But when independence came we continued with what we had been doing in exile and we were ready to govern our own country.
In 1990 I became Namibia’s first Minister for Education and Culture. Now 25% of the national budget is spent on education. The world has changed, we are now facing new challenges such as the HIV and AIDS pandemic, but our commitment to education is just as strong.
The confidence and the skills that we gave people through our education programmes before independence were critical in liberating Namibia and creating a stable and democratic new country. Now we are home, and, for me, it has been a long journey since those days of the Finnish missionaries.”