Remembering Ingrid

Namibia is famed for its vast desert landscapes, but there is nothing like the country’s rain. The world gets strangely dark.

Rain falls as if quenching a great thirst and, all across the land, people delight in the blessing of water. On the road to Windhoek, nearing Okahandja, the strength of a storm forces our driver off the motorway.

Between the beating rain, a surge of trucks and the inability to see more than a few metres down the road, we decide to wait things out near a tree that will bear the brunt of any lightning.

As I watch the rain make a river of the sand beside the road, something about the downpour and the fog helps me remember why I’ve felt so uneasy all Independence Day weekend.

It was raining the day young Ingrid Maasdorp (5) went missing on 20 March and it’s been about a year since her body was found in a tunnel near the new bridge along the B1 Road at Okahandja.

Rain waters memory and swells the river of time. Suddenly, a year that seemed to fly by for me becomes 12 agonising months for Ingrid’s loved ones. 365 days without answers. Over 8 000 hours drowned in the disbelief that their cherished child is never coming home. In the half a million minutes since, there has been no justice and no peace.

And every year on the anniversary of the discovery of Ingrid’s murder, the nation bursts into celebration. “Happy Independence Day!” we all say. We get together. We clink glasses and light braai fires because life is oblivious to our individual sorrow and moves blindly on.

I can’t imagine the dissonance this season must bring for Ingrid’s love ones. I can’t fathom the pain they will have to swallow every year and the disappointment they must feel knowing Ingrid’s killer still walks among us … clinking glasses and lighting braai fires.

A year later, stuck in the rain, I wonder at the ways in which we can honour her.

In the aftermath of Ingrid’s murder, we all had protest signs, broken hearts and great ideas. We would have guards at every school gate. There should be pupil roll-call every morning and quick calls to parents in the case of any absences.

Timeous messages should be sent in the event of no school. We would band together as communities and as human beings to watch over the children because, as James Baldwin said, “the children are always ours, every single one of them”.

Roswinds Fabianu (6) and Beyoncé !Kharuxas (15) were ours too and they were found murdered at Okahandja, mere weeks after Ingrid. There’s been no justice for them or their loved ones either and the marking of their murders will be the shame of April.

Investigations, they say, are ongoing and I’ve come to hate the phrase. It’s the kind of expression that will be trotted out for years, eventually losing all meaning along with all hope.

Inquiries and life go on, but I hope the girls from Okahandja never let us forget.

I hope they haunt us in the strangest ways on the anniversaries of their deaths, sneaking back amid the rain, revealing a multitude of sins.

– martha@namibian.com.na; Martha Mukaiwa on Twitter and Instagram; marthamukaiwa.com

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