‘Our boy is running the show’

During Namibia’s dark days, a young Hage Geingob, and his two friends Hidipo Hamutenya and Theo-Ben Gurirab were tasked with telling Namibia’s story in the US.
The eldest of the three, Gurirab, shares their heart-warming story of life abroad with Namibian Sun’s Gordon Joseph. He beams with pride, as his speaks of ‘their boy’ running the show.

The Nujoma influence
We go back much earlier than in the struggle days. We met at Augustineum at Okahandja in 1958, and it just so happened that we left the country more or less around the same time although I left a little earlier than him. I left the country in September 1962, he did just shortly thereafter.
I went to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, both us went through Botswana.
We later met in the US, in Philadelphia, it was while we were there that comrade Sam Nujoma went to New York to the United Nations to go and mobilise support for Swapo and for Namibia’s independence. In 1964, when comrade Nujoma was on his way to the UN, he put a team together, consisting of Geingob, Hidipo Hamutenya and myself, we were there as students, but he said that while we are studying, we should also tell the story of Namibia’s history, but more importantly to make Swapo known to the general public in America, and to that end, put us together as a team.
The three of us, headed by Geingob, were given the task to make the story of Namibia known to the people of the US and to those at the UN in New York, we were students in Philadelphia.
After the team was put together, Geingob moved to New York to be closer to the UN, while Hidipo and I stayed on in Philadelphia. Later Hidipo also left and went to Canada to further his studies.
We were tasked to from time to time organise the other Namibian students and to share with them any communications from comrade Nujoma, or any of the other Swapo leaders.
We had to tell the story of Namibia and to also tell the story particularly of Swapo.
There were other Namibian liberation movements, like Swanu and the Chiefs Council and so on, so we had an open-ended mandate, to also talk about Africa, there were other African students too, the idea of Pan-Africanism was also getting hold of us. We were exposed to the fathers and mothers of Pan-Africanism and the likes of Ghana’s Nkwame Nkrumah and the first president of Nigeria.
We were also exposed to the likes of Dr William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, Marcus Garvey and many others.

Hage’s admirable traits
What you see in terms of him now as President of the Republic of Namibia, are the same strengths that he had as a young man. The three of us, I was the oldest, followed by Hidipo, and Geingob was the baby among the three of us. He has got tremendous energy, he is very much focused on what he wants to achieve, he is a good student and has a good nose and mind for people who helped him become what he had defined himself to be. We are Pan-Africanist, and learned from Nkrumah, Nyerere, and other great leaders, some of whose countries had not yet then become independent. Nelson Mandela and others, those were our heroes. But it didn’t end with African great people, it also included the Asians who were also at one stage colonised, and we were brought together by the same imperialist countries that had colonised Africa. That is where we learned about internationalism, and about solidarity. Geingob has tremendous organising skills, the ability to bring people together and he has the courage to express his views publicly, clearly and strongly as he is doing now as president. He is very transparent and self-confident. He is respected; with Geingob even if you do not agree with him you can’t help but respect him because his is principled. But his strength is also in being a good student, he is willing to learn, and rethink his own beliefs for the better. Also, Geingob is not arrogant, he is frank.

Reunited
When he became president, one of the first things he did was to call the three of us back together - Hidipo, myself and himself. It was wonderful, we were celebrating, and the media was there. We saw it as the three of us becoming, jointly, presidents (laughs) in the Hage presidency.
We remain friends and we are very proud of everything that he has done and is doing and we think it’s our boy running the show.


GORDON JOSEPH