Heroes’ Day should not merely commemorate the famous. It should remember the young Namibians who stood up in classrooms, schoolyards and streets when doing so could cost them their freedom, and sometimes their lives.
There is something profoundly uncomfortable about the way Namibia remembers its heroes.
Every August, we dust off the language of sacrifice, liberation and patriotism. We gather at Heroes’ Acre. We lay wreaths.
We listen to speeches. We invoke the names of the dead and celebrate the men and women whose courage helped bring colonial rule to an end.
And then, for another year, we go home.
But somewhere between the wreath-laying and the speeches is a question Namibia still has not adequately answered:
Who gets remembered as a hero, and who gets forgotten?
This question is particularly important as the country commemorates Heroes’ Day and reflects on the liberation struggle.
Because if we are serious about remembering the people who fought for Namibia, we cannot allow our history to begin and end with the names that have become politically convenient, institutionally established or already safely engraved in stone.
The liberation struggle was not a single event.
It was not fought only in Angola.
It was not fought only by PLAN combatants.
It was not fought only in diplomatic corridors or by politicians in exile.
It was fought in factories, churches, villages, townships and classrooms.
And in the late 1980s, some of its most courageous soldiers were children.
They became known collectively as the Class of ’88.
But even that description risks doing them an injustice.
They were not simply a generation.
They were individuals.
They had names.
They had families.
They had fears.
And they made choices.
Some of those names deserve to be restored to the national memory.
The story did not begin in 1988
The temptation when discussing the student uprising began with Ponhofi Secondary School on 17 March 1988.
That was the spark that ignited the nationwide boycott.
But it was not the beginning.
The student movement had been becoming increasingly militant before 1988.
The Namibia National Students Organisation, established in 1984, had developed into one of the most important instruments of youth mobilisation against apartheid and Bantu education.
NANSO was not simply a student representative body in the conventional sense. It became a political force capable of mobilising young Namibians around education, militarisation, colonialism and independence.
By 1987, something was changing in the schools.
At schools such as Immanuel Shifidi Secondary School and A. Shipena Secondary School in Windhoek, student resistance was becoming increasingly organised.
Students were meeting.
They were talking politics.
They were organising.
They were questioning authority.
They were refusing to accept the normal routines of an education system they increasingly regarded as part of a wider system of oppression.
The acts could appear small to an outsider.
A refusal to go to class after morning assembly.
Students deliberately disobeying instructions.
Meetings held away from the attention of authorities.
Discussions about liberation.
The circulation of political material.
The development of student structures.
But revolutions rarely announce themselves as revolutions.
They begin with people deciding that something they have been told to accept is no longer acceptable.
That was happening in Namibia’s schools before March 1988.
Shifidi was one of the important centres of this political awakening. Contemporary accounts of the school recall its NANSO branch as one of the most active in the country and identify the school as a breeding ground for youth activism.
Among those associated with its political tradition were people such as Uhuru Dempers and the late Owen Shamena.
A. Shipena was another important centre.
The school itself carried the name of Ananias Shipena, a veteran of the liberation struggle, and had already experienced the violence of apartheid when its administration block was bombed in October 1986.
The point is important.
By the time the nationwide boycott erupted in 1988, the students had already been learning how to resist.
They had been learning how to organise.
They had been learning that authority could be challenged.
And, most importantly, they had been learning that they were not powerless.
Then came Ponhofi
The events at Ponhofi were the culmination of years of militarisation around schools.
The presence of South African military and police bases close to schools in northern Namibia had turned education into a dangerous proposition.
Children were caught in the crossfire between South
MAfrican forces and PLAN.
Students were killed.
Others were wounded.
In March 1987, a mortar struck the girls’ dormitory at Ponhofi, killing Albertina Nghikongelwa. Another learner, Victoria Nghikofa, later died from her injuries. Seven other girls were wounded.
The following year, on 17 March, approximately 700 learners at Ponhofi launched an indefinite boycott demanding the removal of the military base near the school.
What followed was extraordinary.
The boycott spread.
By June, around 40 000 pupils were reported to be participating, with demands including the removal of military bases from schools, the abolition of Bantu education and implementation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 435.
The movement spread from the north to Windhoek, Tsumeb, Gibeon, Walvis Bay, Swakopmund and Arandis.
This was no longer a school dispute.
It was a national political confrontation.
The children who frightened a regime
We sometimes sanitise the liberation struggle because history looks different when viewed from the comfort of independence.
In 1988, there was nothing comfortable about being a student activist. The South African security forces were not debating the students. They were repressing them.
On 6 June 1988, a solidarity rally in Windhoek was attacked by police and Koevoet using sjamboks, clubs, tear gas and rubber bullets.
Around 40 children and adults were arrested, including NANSO Secretary-General Ignatius Shixwameni.
Shixwameni’s name is relatively well known today.
And rightly so.
He became one of the most prominent faces of the student movement and later entered national politics. Former NANSO president Uhuru Dempers recalled that he and Shixwameni were among those arrested after the 1988 uprising.
But Shixwameni was not alone.
That is the point we need to recover.
Ignatius Shixwameni: the boy who became a symbol
Shixwameni should be remembered not simply because he later became a politician.
That would invert the story.
He became a politician because, as a young man, he had already demonstrated political courage.
He was a student leader when the consequences of leadership were arrest, interrogation, intimidation and possible torture.
A later tribute compared him to Tsietsi Mashinini, the famous student leader of the 1976 Soweto uprising, arguing that Namibia’s student rebellion produced its own generation of courageous young leaders.
That comparison is worth considering.
South Africa has built an enduring national mythology around the students of Soweto.
Namibia should be capable of doing the same for the Class of ’88.
But we need to know their names.
Owen Shamena: a name that should not disappear
Among those names is Owen Shamena.
Today, how many young Namibians know who he was?
Shamena was associated with Immanuel Shifidi and the student movement of the 1980s. His name appears repeatedly in recollections of that period, including accounts of Shifidi’s contribution to the student uprising.
A later account of his life described him as one of those young people who decided to remain behind and fight rather than leave the country.
That distinction matters.
The liberation struggle required different kinds of courage. There were those who crossed borders and joined the armed struggle.
There were those who went into exile.
And there were those who stayed. Remaining behind did not necessarily mean doing less.
Sometimes it meant exposing oneself to the security apparatus every single day.
It meant knowing that the person sitting next to you in class could be an informer.
It meant attending meetings while knowing that arrest could follow.
It meant carrying political literature.
It meant refusing to obey.
It meant looking at a uniformed officer and deciding that fear would not determine your behaviour.
Shamena’s story belongs in that history.
Uhuru Dempers and the political education of a generation
Then there is Uhuru Dempers.
His name should be familiar to contemporary Namibia because of his decades of civic activism and public engagement.
But before he became the civil society figure many Namibians know today, Dempers was a schoolboy and student activist.
He has recalled that he was only 17 when he travelled to Britain in 1989 as part of an anti-apartheid campaign.
He later became president of NANSO.
His generation was being politically educated while the country was still under apartheid.
They were not studying liberation as history.
They were living it.
That is one of the most important things contemporary Namibia tends to forget.
For today’s generation, apartheid is something encountered in textbooks.
For the Class of ’88, it was the political system determining whether you could study safely.
It was the soldier outside the school.
It was the police vehicle arriving at the rally.
It was the knock on the door.
It was the possibility that a friend might disappear.
And then there were the names we barely remember
This is where our national remembrance becomes uncomfortable.
There were many others.
Former student activists such as Immaculate Kavendjii, Phanuel Kaapama, Bethuel Kavendjii, Collin Kamahozu, Michael Jimmy, Sima Luiperd, Vincent Kapumburu Likoro and others have been identified as part of the NANSO generation that helped democratise student representation and challenge the authoritarian educational system.
In Kavango, the story produced another generation of activists. Historical accounts identify people such as Marina Kandumbu, Robert Mbambi, Andreas Diyeve, Leonard Kambala Kaveto, Peter Kamwanga, Iria Ausiku, Maria Sisenge, John Mbambo, Peter Shinguwe and many others as part of the student movement’s regional history.
This is precisely why reducing the Class of ’88 to one or two famous personalities is another form of historical erasure.
The real story is not about finding another celebrity hero.
It is about recovering the collective courage of ordinary young people.
The boy who stood up after assembly.
The girl who refused to attend class.
The student who carried a pamphlet.
The teenager who went to a meeting.
The learner who was arrested.
The young activist who disappeared across the border.
The parent who supported the child.
The teacher who looked the other way.
The worker who joined the strike.
The community member who sheltered someone being hunted.
That is the architecture of resistance.
The workers then joined them
Perhaps the most powerful evidence that the students had touched something much bigger than themselves was what happened next.
The National Union of Namibian Workers responded to the student movement with a national strike.
Approximately 60,000 workers participated.
Think about the political significance.
Teenagers started a rebellion in schools.
Workers shut down workplaces.
Parents supported their children.
Churches and civil society rallied behind them.
The education question became a national question.
And the national question became an independence question.
This is why the Class of ’88 deserves more than a paragraph in a history textbook.
They helped demonstrate that the colonial government could no longer command unquestioned obedience.
Heroism is not a government appointment
And this brings us back to Heroes’ Day.
Namibia has a formal national honours system. There is nothing wrong with having one.
A state should recognise extraordinary sacrifice.
But state recognition should never become the definition of heroism.
Because history is larger than the government.
The danger is that we begin to confuse official recognition with historical significance.
A person does not become courageous because a committee says so.
A person becomes courageous because, when faced with fear, they acted.
The students of 1988 did not know whether Namibia would become independent.
They did not know whether Resolution 435 would be implemented.
They did not know whether the regime would retreat.
They did not know what their actions would ultimately achieve.
They acted without the luxury of hindsight.
That is what makes their courage so compelling.
The uncomfortable question
If we are going to celebrate heroes, then Namibia must be prepared to ask whether its pantheon reflects the whole liberation struggle.
Where are the student activists?
Where are the young women who participated?
Where are the organisers whose names never became nationally famous?
Where are the students from Shifidi and Shipena?
Where are the people from Ponhofi?
Where are the activists from Kavango?
Where are the young people from Walvis Bay, Swakopmund, Arandis, Tsumeb and Gibeon?
Where are the people who were arrested and never became politicians?
Where are the people whose lives changed forever but whose names never entered the national honours system?
And perhaps most importantly:
Where are the names of the children who died before they could grow old enough to tell their own stories?
Albertina Nghikongelwa.
Victoria Nghikofa.
Hilka Mwanyekange.
These were not statistics.
They were children.
They went to school.
They had friends.
They had parents.
They had futures.
The military presence around their school turned those futures into graves.
If Heroes’ Day is about sacrifice, then their stories belong at its centre.
We need a Class of ’88 memorial
The Windhoek Observer believes Namibia should consider establishing a National Class of ’88 Memorial and Archive.
Not another monument to political leaders.
A place dedicated to the students.
Their photographs.
Their names.
Their testimonies.
Their school records.
Their letters.
Their detention records.
Their political pamphlets.
Their memories.
A digital archive should be created so that today’s children can hear directly from the young people who were once their age.
Every secondary school should teach the story.
And every year, on Heroes’ Day, the nation should hear the names of those students who stood up.
Because young Namibians should understand that freedom was not delivered to them as an abstract gift from distant politicians.
It was contested.
It was demanded.
It was resisted for.
And sometimes it was paid for by people not much older than themselves.
The real folly of Heroes’ Day
The folly of Heroes’ Day is therefore not remembering heroes.
It is remembering them too narrowly.
The liberation struggle was too complicated, too painful and too courageous to fit neatly into a list of official names.
Namibia should have the confidence to broaden its memory.
We should be able to honour PLAN fighters and student activists.
We should honour political prisoners and workers.
We should honour people who operated underground and those who resisted openly.
We should honour the famous and the forgotten.
And we should be especially careful about those whose political importance disappeared because they did not go on to occupy high office.
The Class of ’88 reminds us of something uncomfortable but profoundly important:
Heroism does not always wear a uniform.
Sometimes it wears a school uniform.
Sometimes it carries a schoolbag.
Sometimes it stands in a classroom after morning assembly and quietly refuses to move.
Sometimes it is a teenager who knows that the police may arrive but attends the meeting anyway.
Sometimes it is a young person who chooses exile.
Sometimes it is another who stays behind.
And sometimes it is a child who simply says:
No more.
That was the spirit of 1988.
It did not begin in March.
March was the crescendo.
The resistance had been building in schools and among young people long before Ponhofi became the rallying point of a national rebellion.
Shifidi.
Shipena.
Ponhofi.
Kavango.
Windhoek.
And the countless classrooms and schoolyards where a generation learned that obedience was not the only possible response to oppression.
So, as Namibia once again celebrates Heroes’ Day, perhaps we should do something more difficult than laying another wreath.
We should remember the names.
We should recover the stories.
We should ask the surviving members of that generation to tell us what really happened.
And we should give the Class of ’88 back to the nation.
Because they were not merely students who missed a year of school.
They were young Namibians who understood, before many adults did, that there are moments in history when going to class is less important than deciding what kind of country you want to live in.
They chose freedom.
They stood up.
And Namibia should never allow itself to forget that some of the country’s bravest heroes were once simply children in school uniforms.
