Inside the dungeons

“You will shit today.”With these words by one of the men intent on dragging him to the Lubango dungeons for allegedly spying for the apartheid regime, Oiva Angula's worse nightmare became a reality. Now decades later, Angula has penned a tell-all exposé on life as a Swapo captive in the infamous dungeons where the ruling party turned on its own and unleashed untold suffering. Angula describes how he was stripped and whipped night and day, while hopes of him and other prisoners ever returning to Namibia faded. Certain Swapo members reportedly used the dungeons in the Angolan town to either eliminate or terrorise suspected dissidents. Angula's book, 'Swapo Captive… A comrade's experience of betrayal and torture', also relates how forced confessions were obtained through prolonged nights of torture. It also reveals how the Swapo captives had hoped that a visit in 1986 by the then commander-in-chief of the People's Liberation Army of Namibia, Sam Nujoma, would bring relief. “When Nujoma finally arrived in the company of Hawala (Salomon) and senior security officers, the whole atmosphere was tense. We were lined up some 100 metres from the three pits. Inmates from nearby pits also joined us. Nujoma appeared before us, beefy in a brownish camouflage uniform, frowning and uneasy, though making no effort to conceal his self-importance,” Angula wrote. However, they were left stunned when Nujoma chastised them for being “reactionaries” and said they would be paraded at Freedom Square once Namibia was free. “I instantly realised that Nujoma had deserted us. He had failed us, he was the betrayer, not me…Those detainees who thought that Nujoma had no idea of the terror campaign driven by Swapo's security chief Salomon 'Jesus' Hawala, were disillusioned.” At the weekend, Nujoma's senior aide John Nauta said allegations around the Lubango dungeons were not new. He also said the founding president had not read the book and he doubts whether he would be interested in reading it. He also emphasised that it would be a “waste of time” to send questions to Nujoma because he doubts whether he would respond. Efforts to obtain comment from former defence chief Hawala proved futile. High hopesThe book also recounts how Angula joined the liberation struggle with high hopes and that his time in exile had included a stint as a journalist for PLAN's mouthpiece, The Combatant. Angula had left for exile shortly after the assassination of Ovaherero paramount chief Clemens Kapuuo on 27 March 1978. He described a rude awakening in 1980 when current Zambezi governor Lawrence Sampofu, one of the camp's security officers, in the presence of a gang of Swapo security agents, all pointing their AK-47s at them, took him and five others on a so-called mission. “The agents led us to an area dotted with underground pits, known as omalambo. All six of us were lowered into a pit by means of a wooden stick, which was then taken away. The pit was 5m deep and 5m by 6m across, its mouth covered with wooden logs and sand. A small opening above was then closed with a heavy metal shutter, reinforced with stones. It was very dark. We had no blankets, but it was stiflingly warm inside the pit. All of us kept silent. I felt a distressing sensation that we were being buried alive.” They were freed on 26 August 1980 and served in Swapo administration duties including being a deputy officer on night duty at the defence headquarters (DHQ). However, his freedom ended four years later. He wrote that at around 10:00 on 22 October 1984, six heavily armed men burst into his office at PLAN's defence headquarters where he was adding the finishing touches to an edition of The Combatant. “You are now deep in the elephant's asshole,” Angula recounted the lanky commander, brandishing an AK-47 as saying to him. The commander produced an arrest warrant signed by then commander Hawala. “My mind raced desperately over what could be wrong. I took a swift journey into my past. I remembered only good work I had done for the Swapo cause. Even in exile, I have done my past conscientiously and in an exacting way, always to the best of my abilities. All these were spoiled by the coldness of my arrest. Despite my repeated questions, they refused to say why I was wanted.” Thereafter he was taken to the screening base, the major coordinating centre for Swapo security services, where life and death decisions were made. In the evening he was taken to an underground room when met Zacharia Ndjafa Nakashole, a senior security officer. “The party decided to arrest you because you are a spy, a traitor to your own people,” a senior security officer Angula Kauaya told him when he asked why he was there. “Kauaya then revealed that the purpose of my interrogation was not to find out whether or not I was a spy, but to extract information on all my 'enemy activities since joining PLAN. I was already pronounced guilty, violating both my individual rights as a suspect and the standards of due process. The two were the investigator, sheriff, judge, executioner and gravedigger rolled into one…For thirty minutes they pushed me, pummelled me, ripped at my clothes; hit me with sticks and rifle butts. My body flopped like a rag doll.” Angula also shares how his friends, former classmates from Martin Luther High School were brutally beaten by security agents in front of him and forced to confess to conspiring with the enemy.Others ate ratsThe meals were awful, the book tells, under-or-overcooked rice or porridge, and in times of short supply there was little to eat besides a handful of bug-infested maize meal. “I remember one summer morning when the toilet pit was filled with rainwater almost to the brim. When we were called to relieve ourselves and empty our chambers tins, we found a stray dog, nearly drowned. The dog was fished out, killed and barbecued for the day's meal. Some of us ate ape and dog meat, others ate rats,” Angula related of his four and half years in the dungeons. “We were all full of lice. We spent countless hours picking them off one another, which made us look like starved monkeys grooming one another.” Attempts to reach Sampofu at the weekend were unsuccessful as his cellphone remained unreachable. JEMIMA BEUKES

Inside the dungeons

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Namibian Sun 2025-07-03

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Inside the dungeons

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Namibian Sun 2025-07-03

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