Education Struggle Part 1 : The begining

It's Friday, thank the lord it is Friday. So in the spirit of happy Friday I will post a series of blogs about my struggle through the Namibian Education system. So as of Today, Friday is Struggle story Friday, enjoy. On the flip side though, this is not going to turn out well for some people, because I will name and shame. Especially those who broke the English language so bad, even the queen would getting her knickers in a knot.

There are very few memories from my early childhood that are clear, most are just traces of events with no clear picture of what really happened. I guess I was too young to commit anything to permanent memory; I have no clear memory of what my father looked like, how his voice sounded. I use that as a barometer of time in my memories, I know for certain that everything that I clearly remember from my childhood happened after I turned three years old and after my father died. 

One of the most vivid memories from my childhood is clear as daylight; I am standing in the middle of a dry pan. Dried clay covers it from one horizon to the next, all I see in all four directions is thousands of mud cracks and a group of young children in rag tag clothes clutching a 2 litre plastic container filled with Oshikundu/Ontanku. Ontaku/Oshikundu is a Namibian traditional drink; it’s a mixture of water, millet pap and sorghum. It has contains the energy equivalent of three red bulls in just one gulp. I stopped to catch my breath and struggle to keep up with the group, so I fell behind and see the gap between me and the group grow faster than the income inequality in modern day Namibian Society. As hard as I try I just can’t muster the strength to walk anymore, so I sit down. Sharp pain stings into my feeble muscles, I feel cramps overcoming my anaerobic respiring limbs as lactic acid builds up in my young fragile body. I am doomed, what if the beast that grandma always told me lurks beyond our fence is really real and not just something she made up to scare me from treading beyond the fence around our millet field. At that point I look up and there she is, my savoir, my superman and batman all rolled into one. My big sister Varburga (it’s German, don’t blame me for that), she picks me up without expanding any energy and puts me on her back. She carries me until we are both far in front of the group and puts me down, but the time the rest of the munchkins catch up with us we are already at our destination.

Ask yourself; go ahead because I know that you want to. Where the heck where we going? We were going to school of course, unlike some of you kids who had school buses my earliest memory of school was walking a few kilometres across a dry pan to get to a ramshackle structure built out of corrugated iron sheets and wooden poles. Why the heck was I not at home, where I belonged? Scrawny little toddlers that look like those malnourished Somali children on CNN really shouldn’t be traversing dry rain water reservoirs. But grandma was away and even at that young age I was just too mischievous to be left alone in a homestead by myself, what if I got attacked by the chickens or drowned in the large ceramic bowl that we kept the drinking water in? The risks of leaving me at home alone far outweighed the negatives of dragging me to the local school. I remember feeling very dumb because I hardly knew anything, the teacher never dared ask me to repeat the song we just sang because I always gave her my mafia look. Turns out that the teacher knew that I didn’t have a clue what was going on and always overlooked me on purpose, who would have thought? At this point as I try to reconstruct the class room with no chairs and just one large black board, the pictures start to break up. I can’t remember anymore than that, clearly too far in the past. Only thing I can still pull out is the crowded water tap at break time, pulling precious liquid from a huge plastic water tank adjacent to it. Then it all just fades into oblivion.

That’s how the Education Struggle started, from very humble beginnings I would rise up and climb to heights that were deemed impossible for blacks during the old regime, heights that were prohibited under the law with a purpose not only to undermine the Namibian Nation but to keep it under the feet of the old regime (okay, just then I just realized that I sound exactly like Job Amupanda). From not being able to write my own name to having an online blog and a weekly column in a local daily newspaper, enough of the ego rubbing, the story continues. But not now, another time.