MORE than 50 years after the cause of a colonised Namibia first saw their paths crossing, and resulted in both of them addressing a United Nations committee on the situation in South African-ruled Namibia, Hans Beukes and United States citizen Emory Bundy have for the first time visited Namibia together.
Emory Bundy was one of the three Americans who helped Beukes leave South Africa by smuggling him out of the country in the back of a Volkswagen Beetle. That was in July 1959. Later that year, after Bundy and his travel companions had paid a clandestine visit to Namibia, they and Beukes joined a handful of previous petitioners to the United Nations to tell the world about the plight of Namibians under the rule of a racist and oppressive government in South Africa.Half a century after that visit to Namibia, Bundy has now made a first return visit to the country where he and fellow Americans Allard Lowenstein and Sherman Bull interviewed icons from Namibia’s liberation struggle, such as Chief Hosea Kutako, Chief Samuel Hendrik Witbooi, and Reverend Markus Kooper, and took messages from them to the UN to let the world hear what was happening in South African-ruled Namibia.The role that Kutako, Witbooi, Kooper and also Beukes played in petitioning the UN is well known. Less widely remembered is the contribution that Lowenstein, Bundy and Bull also made at that stage.Hans Beukes was smuggled across the South African border into Botswana because his passport had been seized by the SA Security Police. Speaking to The Namibian in Windhoek last weekend, he recalled that this happened as he arrived by train in Port Elizabeth, where he was supposed to board a ship bound for Norway. He was on his way to Norway after he had been awarded a scholarship to continue his studies.At that time, he was a 23-year-old student, in the second year of law studies at the University of Cape Town.Beukes’s arrest and the confiscation of his passport was a major story in the English newspapers in South Africa at the time, Bundy recalls.After that run-in with the Security Police, he returned to Cape Town, where he was introduced to an American, Allard Lowenstein, Beukes says. The introduction was impressive, as he was told that Lowenstein had previously worked with some celebrated figures in liberal US politics, such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson and Senator Hubert Humphrey, who was later to serve as US Vice President.Lowenstein was in South Africa with Bundy, then 22 years old, and medical student Sherman Bull. Lowenstein told him he had been asked by Reverend Michael Scott, who at that stage was a petitioner to the UN on behalf of people in Namibia, and Jariretundu Kozonguizi to pay a visit to Namibia to observe conditions there and make a report to the UN about South Africa’s administration of its mandate over the territory, Beukes says.At that time, Bundy says, it was feared that international interest in the issue of South Africa’s control over Namibia was fading, and it was felt that if some new eyes could make reports to the UN it could revive interest in the fate of the country.Beukes says Lowenstein told him that unless some Namibians left the comfort of their homes to fight on the international stage, where South Africa had a monopoly at the time, they could forget about getting rid of apartheid.Beukes travelled with Lowenstein, Bundy and Bull to Johannesburg, and from there they took him across the border into Botswana.With Michael Scott having had close ties to the Khama family in Botswana, Beukes ended up being given sanctuary by Seretse Khama – later the first leader of independent Botswana – for some five weeks.Beukes recalls that he left South Africa with 54 pounds in his pockets. He later borrowed 30 pounds from Seretse Khama, and was later also sent US$750 by a US students organisation.Having helped the passportless Beukes get out of the country, Lowenstein, Bundy and Bull returned to South Africa and, posing as tourists, travelled on to Namibia. Here they managed to meet with leaders like Samuel Hendrik Witbooi, Markus Kooper, and, one evening at Gobabis, also with the aged Hosea Kutako.They had a tape recorder with them, and used this to record what Kutako and the others were telling them about the conditions in Namibia and their wishes for UN intervention.By the autumn of 1959, Beukes, Kozonguizi, Lowenstein, Bundy and Bull joined previous petitioners Scott and Mburumba Kerina at the UN in New York City to address the General Assembly’s Fourth Committee, which dealt with mandate issues.They managed to get the committee’s permission to play the tape recordings that the three Americans had made in Namibia, while transcripts of the recordings were also distributed to the committee.The fact that they were allowed to be heard set a precedent, because it meant that Namibians were allowed to speak for themselves at the UN, Beukes says.If their purpose was to raise awareness of the issue of South Africa’s control over Namibia, they succeeded. Eleanor Roosevelt also met them and later wrote an admiring newspaper column about the three young Americans and Beukes.Lowenstein later wrote a book, ‘Brutal Mandate’, on their visit to Namibia and South Africa’s rule over the territory.Beukes made it to Norway to take up the scholarship he had won. He only returned to Namibia again in 1989, and is still living in Norway.He and Bundy renewed ties when their paths crossed again in 2000, when they met each other at an event where the twentieth anniversary of the death of Lowenstein was observed. Lowenstein was a liberal activist who was later elected as a US Congressman for one term and served in the administration of President Jimmy Carter before he was murdered in his office in 1980. Now Bundy, Beukes and their wives, Edel Beukes and Noel Angell, have visited Namibia together for the first time. They are also visiting Botswana and South Africa – the places where Beukes and Bundy took some of the first steps on a long road to freedom together back in 1959.Last weekend they visited the grave of Chief Hosea Kutako with Kerina, who addressed the old Chief in Otjiherero on their behalf. It was a deeply moving visit, they say.
