A Namibian hero looks back

By: JANA-MARI SMITH

Chief of the City Police, Abraham Kanime, decided to celebrate Hero’s day by visiting the sandy forest where the armed liberation struggle was kick-started on 26 August 1966.

Yesterday, Chief Kanime, dressed in his former Plan-fighter uniform, and two friends, were met by two Namibian reporters at Tunama Omuguluwombashe, in the Omusati region.
In the local language, Omuguluwombashe means ‘Forrest of Giraffe.” For the people of the Namibian armed struggle, like Kanime, this is the place which symbolises the beginning of the long walk to liberation. Kanime has close links to that liberation struggle.
His uncle, Ambambi Ndaula Shaningwa, was one of the men captured by the South African army at Omuguluwombashe, and subsequently spent many years locked up at Robben Island’s notorious prison.
Kanime’s brother, Joel Gweendama Kanime, lost his life during the war when he was only 20 year’s old. Kanime himself was a Sergeant who spent nine years in the green bush uniform mobilising soldiers and civilians.
Standing beneath two old Omusati trees (or Mopane trees as they are known in other regions) Kanime said that his trip to the birth-place of the armed struggle was his way of honouring those who died, and remembering his brother.
Kanime said he wanted to “pay tribute to the fallen hero’s of the liberation struggle.”
 “This was where the first battle between Plan fighters and the South African army took place,” he explained.
Kanime joined Plan as a fighter when he was 19 years old. He remembers that it was impossible to resist the allure of fighting for his people, and his country.
“I attended my first Swapo rally in 1977 when I was 17.” During that time, Kanime says, the liberation war had begun to intensify and the “SA army became brutal to the community. That situation forced us to join.”
The most powerful attraction for Kanime, and his peers, however, was the presence of Plan fighters in the villages and the bush veld surrounding their homes. Young Kanime and his friends often helped the men and that eventually “motivated me to join.”
He joined the fight - that would ultimately lead to independence - when he started military training in Angola in 1980.
Kanime remained in uniform for the next nine years.
“I only took it off during the peace process.”
It took him some time to come to terms with the new, free, Namibia.
“When we were fighting in the war, we obviously knew we were fighting for independence. But one never knew when it will be like. Yes, one day, we will get independence. But reaching that stage…”
His mind on the past, he added, “When it came, you don’t believe it.”
And now, Kanime uses his decade of experience in a brutal war, as a way to gage progress in the twenty years since.
“If you were here, in that time, in the war zone, you could not believe that there will be a day that you will move freely in this country.”
He adds, “We can be proud of the peace and stability we enjoy now.”
Kanime remembers during military training in Germany he was warned that the “fight with the gun is easiest. But the hard struggle is economic emancipation.”
Chief Kanime, a Namibian hero who fought for his belief in a free country, believes that developing Namibia “is a process. We are moving there. We are getting there.”

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