This is a guest blog post from our student social media ambassador, Kurt. Currently studying abroad on the semester program, “Decolonizing the Mind: Racial and Environmental Justice” that travels to both Namibia and South Africa during the semester.
With just a little over 4 weeks left in the semester, reflecting on my time in Namibia feels bittersweet. Sweet because of all of the life-changing, exciting, fantastic experiences I’ve had, but bitter because I know it is coming to an end. It’s difficult to put into words all that we have learned. We spent the first 2 weeks of the semester in Johannesburg and Cape Town, South Africa. What we learned there about the depth and breadth of apartheid has informed the rest of our time in Southern Africa.
Our time in South Africa also introduced a central theme that has come up time and again in Namibia: the paradox of tragedy and extreme ugliness and resilience and beauty. We have visited stunning places like Cape Town, South Africa, and Luderitz, Namibia, and learned how apartheid-era officials and German soldiers carried out horrific acts of violence against Black and native people. Namibians have made extraordinary progress toward building a just society (in just 36 years of independence), which we’ve learned about in our history class and in a visit to Parliament. But we’ve also seen first-hand the extreme inequality that persists here, in visits to Windhoek’s townships, personal encounters with extreme poverty, and discussions with community leaders. It’s difficult to understand how all of this can exist at once, in one small country.
Confronting this paradox requires a decolonization of our thinking. Colonialism relies on people believing a single, powerful narrative: that a certain country is backward, a group of people naïve, a specific way of living wrong. But we have learned that the world is far more complicated. Namibia is not one-sided. It contains beautiful landscapes and horrible histories, intolerable inequality and inspirational community leaders. One of my favorite talks was given by a transgender sex worker, Rachel, in the coastal town of Walvis Bay. In the same talk, she spoke about the terrifying reality of being transgender in Namibia and her love of her country and pride in its constitution. To hold both realities true at the same time is a lesson in thinking beyond colonial binaries of good and bad, developed and undeveloped, modern and backward. It is a lesson in recognizing and appreciating justice while still working tirelessly to address injustice. I am forever grateful for the opportunity to connect with the speakers and professors we have met during our time here and can’t wait to see what our last month here will bring!
