Living in two worlds

Tumultuous political and social changes serve as bookends to their formative years. First, it was the attack on the Swapo camp at Cassinga in southern Angola on 4 May 1978 that left 600 dead and many wounded.

Many of them were left destitute and orphaned in this massacre.

Later their lives would once again be abruptly and inexplicably changed when the Berlin Wall crashed down in November 1989 and a new Namibia was being born in 1990.

This was the reality for 430 Namibian pre-school war orphans and some selected children from families of Swapo functionaries that were taken from Swapo camps in Angola and Zambia to the former East Germany, the then German Democratic Republic (GDR), to a place of safety and where they spent their formative years.

This experience has left an indelible mark on their lives. More than 27 years after their return to Namibia, a country they have barely known, many of the former GDR kids, as they are still called today, struggle with conflicting identifies and questions of where they belong; in Namibia where they are still considered as “different” or in Germany, where they are different.

“I did not like to idea to go to Namibia,” said Nali Conrad, one of the first cohort of refugee children to have been taken to East Germany in late 1979 and returned in 1989. “I knew I came from Angola but knew about Namibia from Namibian teachers who told us about it. I had no idea where we were going to live.”

In the aftermath of the attack at Cassinga, hasty talks of what was to happen to the children started.

Nahas Angula, from the United States of America, had contacted the Swapo representative in East Germany, Obed Emvula, with a request to ask the central committee of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) then governing East Germany, to provide assistance to the children.

Emvula recalled that the response from the SED came fast and in late 1979 the first 90 Swapo refugee children were flown to East Germany.

An idyllic life

The children were first taken to the remote Jagdschloss Bellin, a hunting castle in a remote north-eastern village, where many stayed for the first seven years in East Germany.

“It was an idyllic life,” said another former GDR kid, Ndatyapelao Nangula Costa.

Costa, like Conrad, was three years old when they arrived at the castle, which served as a safe haven, a bubble from all the upheavals that took place around them.

There, they were taken care of by German minders who cooked and cleaned for them and took care of their physical and social well-being. There they had ample space inside the castle and the surrounding green, lush forests to play and grow up as normal children could.

Former teachers remember that it was often said that the children were sent to East Germany for the purpose of forming a new elite for the future independent state of Namibia.

The teachers, however, do not think this was the case.

“A good number of these children were really very sick,” remembered the former principal at the School of Friendship at Stassfurt, Heinz Berg. “They have suffered a lot and they had to be healed in the first place, which was first done at Bellin.”

Some of the educators at Bellin said it was a tough task to heal the children. It was also initially thought that the children would later be sent back to Angola but Swapo representatives had asked that they remain there.

It was at this point when the idea was developed to establish a joint programme for the education of the children.

At Bellin the children were given pre-primary education in German and they were taught there up to Grade 2.

Their link to Namibia was limited and brought to them by Namibian refugees who intermittently stayed at the castle where they were trained as teachers. Most of this experience was through song and dance. On rare occasions the children were exposed to traditional Namibian foods.

For the most part the children were brought up speaking German in a German environment. They did, however, develop their own unique mixture of German and Oshiwambo, later to be called Oshi-Deutsch, which was a secret language used among the children when they tried to escape the ears of the adult world.

Years later they would go to a nearby primary school at Zehna, about 3 kilometres from Bellin, where they completed their Grade 3 and 4.They later attended school at Loderburg for their fifth and sixth grades.

School and friendship

The lives of the children once again changed when they were taken to the former School of Friendship Stassfurt to start their secondary education.

It was here where a unique curriculum developed by the former East German Academy of Educational Sciences in collaboration with Swapo that provided the protocol for the children’s education, was implemented.

The curriculum was not without controversy. It was later described as having been littered with political socialisation and that the children had received para-military training, something that former teachers roundly denied.

“In West Germany there were reports published that the teachers were radical socialists. This was not true. We lived in a communist system but everyday life was not just political education. We did other things; it was not all about singing political songs. It was a different political system that reflected a socialist country but the accusations that we were Stalinists were wrong and hurt us,” said former mathematics and physics teacher at the School of Friendship as Stassfurt, Bernd Kaden.

Dr Jürgen Krause, a former member of the Academy said the education programme for the Namibian children was a unique project that attempted to merge two cultures into one to form something new without compromising where the children came from.

Swapo stipulated that the curriculum had to include and integrate the national character of both Namibia and African culture. According to Krause this posed a difficulty because the core curriculum for GDR schools could not be amended or altered because its goal was to educate a future German socialist youth.

A compromise for the Namibian children was reached. The Namibian children would be taught mathematics, physics and chemistry as was taught in all other GDR schools. Minor changes were made to German language classes, geology, and art. Other subjects fundamentally changed were history, geography and musical education. A new subject, English, was taught to the Namibian children.

Another aspect taught was ideological education, which Krause said was based on the idea of forming a “socialist personality” with the possibility of a socialist regime in an independent Namibia.

Swapo provided two Namibian history books to add to the children’s education.

Krause said one of big challenges were that the German educators had no knowledge of Africa.

“It was not clear if they would be able to implement what we have worked out theoretically. Another obstacle was where the curriculum would reach the children,” said Krause.

“Bear in mind that the legal basis of the project was the contract between the socialist unity party state and Swapo. We as educators simply implemented what has been decided or commissioned. We were not the body or agency that had a say in what was to be implemented,” said Berg.

Another teacher, Herbert Rudnitzki, felt that it would have been better had German teachers gone to the refugee camps to train learners and teachers alike rather to have brought them to another, foreign context.

Overall, however, both the designers of the curriculum and teachers felt that the educational project was a success in so far as it was allowed to run.

The teachers remember the Namibian children as very lively, inquisitive, eager to learn and very ambitious.

The German teachers felt that the experience with the Namibian children had a deeply enriching effect on their own lives.

Things fall apart

The educational programme for the Namibian children came to an abrupt end when the GDR fell apart and the Berlin Wall came down. At home, Namibia was gaining its independence from apartheid South Africa.

The GDR government decided to stop all and any support to the programme. All East German teachers involved in the education of Namibian and 900 Mozambican students were sent to the streets.

The curriculum of the Namibian learners was shredded by the outgoing GDR state; all of 45 kilogrammes of educational materials Krause was able to smuggle out. This remaining material is currently kept in the archives of the Ministry of Veterans Affairs in Namibia.

The sudden termination of the education programme left everyone bewildered and unsettled. For the East German teachers it meant an uncertain period of unemployment. For the Namibian children it meant that they were not able to complete their secondary education. And they were sent home to Namibia, a country they did not know.

Return to Namibia

Kader remembers that they were given three weeks’ notice of the termination and return of the Namibian children to their motherland.

The children were allowed to pack two suitcases and under cover of darkness, accompanied by some of their teachers, they were driven in busses to the airport at Frankfurt from where they flew back to Namibia.

Their transition back to Namibia, a country they barely knew or considered in their young lives, was equally troubling and chaotic.

Many to this day feel that they were abandoned by the GDR that unceremoniously pulled the plug and upon their arrival in Namibia they felt “let down” or ignored by Swapo that in the final analysis had the responsibility for their well-being.

It might very well have had a lasting impact on their integration back into Namibian society.

“This is what has disappointed me,” said Conrad. “They [Swapo] wanted us back but did not do anything to make us feel at home. The Namibian government called us back but there was no-one to receive us. On the other hand, though, we were not the only ones who came back to Namibia at that time. There were also children from Cuba and other countries who returned. Maybe we were just too much of a burden or there were too many things to do.”

Emvula, who was closely involved with the programme of the former GDR kids, acknowledged that the sudden and “premature” return was not handled very well.

“It was not the best that we had wished for. Arrangements were not in place. For example, parents or relatives were not consulted. Some were informed, others not. It was not a good situation. There was no infrastructure. It was not orderly. There was no time to make proper plans,” said Emvula.

Emvula said Swapo was “not ready to receive” the children “in a good way”.

The children were first taken to a reception area set up at St Andrews, the Roman Catholic Church in Khomasdal, where parents, relatives or other guardians came to claim them.

Many were not immediately claimed. Conrad was one of the children that was collected by her mother almost two months after her return from Germany.

There were also rumours that other children were wrongfully claimed by unscrupulous people who went to pick up the children because of N$50 and blanket given to these children.

Conrad and others were later sent to a German school in Swakopmund where the completed their secondary schooling.

There, they felt more taken care of even by the Namibian German community than by Swapo. The West German government had also jumped in by pumping millions to pay for the continued schooling and some counselling of the children.

Not feeling quite at home in Namibia and not sure of a future here, Conrad after school, decided to return to Germany where she entered an apprenticeship programme to become a nurse.

While most of the former GDR kids remained in Namibia, many returned to Germany where they felt more at home.

Conrad, like others, remains in two worlds.

“I like Namibia as much as I like Germany. I try to take the best of both. I, however, cannot say that I am a German. People ask me if I feel I am Namibian. If I had liked Namibia that much I would not have come back [to Germany]. I can, however, imagine going back to Namibia for good but I do not plan for it.”

Catherine Sasman