Bob Kandetu was a student in New York when Gwen Lister told him about her idea to start a revolutionary and liberation struggle-oriented newspaper.
At the time, Lister had just left Windhoek Advertiser (now Windhoek Observer) after the apartheid system tore it apart.
While in New York, Kandetu met the then-Swapo representative in New York, Theo-Ben Gurirab and his friend.
“We had a dinner and a long discussion about the dos and don’ts and how best to do things,” he says.
Kandetu returned to Namibia after finishing his studies and joined the Council of Churches (CCN).
He met with Lister in Windhoek and discussed the progress of her plan to start a newspaper, which eventually worked.
They then launched The Namibian, which was supported by liberation supporters, different churches, the youth movement and Swapo.
“We all gathered around the newspaper. Daniel Tjongarero and I took my bakkie and delivered the first dummy newspapers to different outlets that we were recruiting to become selling points, and this was long before the era of cellphones,” he says.
One day while Kandetu and Tjongarero were running around to drop off a batch of newspapers, they noticed a South African intelligence vehicle following them at a 100m distance.
He says the car had been following them for days.
That day he got out of his car and walked over to the vehicle and told the people inside that they had also been following them at a distance.
From there, he says the vehicle never followed them and they proceeded to deliver more newspapers.
After some time, they felt they needed to grow the paper and recruit reporters. They then recruited reporters like Raja Munamava, Chris Shipanga and John Walenga (the founder of The Villager), whom he called “young men” at the time.
They arranged an overnight crash course to teach the “young men” the basics of writing news articles, understand why the newspaper was established, and how to turn regular reporting into revolutionary reporting.
“We pulled a cadre of reporters second to none in this country at the time,” says Kandetu.
He says the The Namibian has always encouraged people to have a purpose with their reporting, and not to just work for a salary.
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