Author Profile Mvula ya Nangolo, Namibian Poet Extraordinaire

What do you do when the injustices around you, in your country or in the world, are too much for you to bear and you need an outlet? Do you vent, do you complain or do you turn those frustrations into art?

If you can write, you write. Till you have said what you needed to say, till your words have reached the ears and eyes of the people you want them to and until you have nothing left to write.

While living through the systematic oppression of apartheid, moving from town to town as a child and then eventually living in exile in Germany, Peter Mvula ya Nangolo discovered that he was a writer and a poet.

He developed a love for words as a young Namibian boy and it is something he always enjoyed and knew he was good at. He says he knew from early on he would become a published writer.

“As I grew older, my writing matured. The pieces I wrote though could not be published here because there were no black newspapers. I knew what I wrote would be rejected.”

So by about the age of 18 he joined Swapo and considers himself lucky enough to have been under the wing of Andimba Toivo ya Toivo. He cites the struggle hero as the person he learnt a lot from about life and politics. Ya Nangolo moved to Germany to study journalism on a scholarship, after choosing not to go to the United States due to what he terms ‘its racism’.

“I used my time there to read up on Namibia as much as I could. I paged through many books and archive documents.”

Also while there, he worked at radio stations in both halves of the then-split country. He at some point compiled a weekly radio youth programme that was broadcast to Africa. He said that his time in the country opened his eyes to many things.

Upon his return to Africa, Ya Nangolo lived in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania where he established a TV programme on Namibia that would be broadcast in English, Afrikaans, Oshiwambo and Otjiherero.

With the help of the late politician Moses Garöeb, he started the programme as well as the Swapo newspaper Namibia Today of which he was the first editor while still in exile.

Ya Nangolo has published many poems and books to date. All of them have been published in America, because he found the Namibian market too small. Some of his titles are 1976’s ‘From Exile’, 1991’s ‘Thoughts From Exile’, 1995’s political documentary ‘Kassinga – A Story Untold’ and his latest work ‘Watering The Beloved Desert’ which is a collection of new poems as well as ones from as far back as 1976.

He has also been featured in ‘When My Brothers Came Home: Poems from Central and Southern Africa’.

Currently he is the special advisor to the Minister of Information and Communication Technology. He hopes that the government will put more effort into having his books and bodies of works featured in school and public libraries.

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