Week 3: Two Countries, One Continent

By Mickey Liebrecht



Mural at District 6 museum

In the past week we’ve transitioned from exploring Cape Town in South Africa to exploring Windhoek and our semester schedule in Namibia. I’ll start off with telling my experience with learning more about what Apartheid did to many communities of color from the District Six museum. Then I’ll move to talking a bit about Namibia and the budding possibilities that I’ve been able to see coming in my future.

While still in South Africa, we went to a museum called the District 6 Museum, and though its building is small, the gravity of its contents is not. The museum is a collection of donated items not just from the destroyed community of District 6, but the people who were forced to ‘relocate’ to another area so their community could be used for white homes – spoiler alert, they never did anything with the land after destroying the community that’d already been there. Our tour guide had his own stories from when he lived in District Six, and with them there was an air of pride about him that really stood out to me. He was proud because the district itself was filled with people of all kinds – race, religion, etc. – living together as harmonically as human beings can live with one another. This, in his opinion (and mine too), was what made the district a threat to the government, as they believed this could never happen in real life, or at least were selling that idea to their “fellow whites;” the most important ones at the time to sell this idea to, as they did have the easiest position within the structure of the country to do something about it.



Top view of District 6

His stories, along with the many others illustrated within the museum, were heart-breaking yes, but they didn’t break my heart in the same way other stories I’ve heard about Apartheid in the past few weeks have. Other stories have left me close to tears, or just flat out crying, as I hear them and/or read them, but I believe the stories of District Six had a different effect on me, because the storyteller was a man who experienced this atrocity and managed to leave me smiling after ending his story with a few jokes and some hope thrown in there for good measure; the government is currently working on a project that will rebuild District Six from the rubble that’s still there. The tour guide was a fun, happy, and naturally light-hearted spirit, a lot like who I used to be when I was younger. Also, the fact that he went through all this and still manages to make fun of it and be happy with himself and his life and the simple pleasures of it, gives me hope for myself. Hope that eventually, I’ll be able to do the same thing with some of the darker parts of my past, and move on to do something about them – within society – in the future. It’s one of the best experiences I’ve had so far, for that reason.

My future in Windhoek also seems brighter because of this, as I’m continuing to learn more about the area and the organizations that reside here, fighting the good fight for their groups of humanity who are being “screwed over” essentially by the government and society – my words. I look forward to learning more from the two organizations I’ve been focusing on as the semester goes on, and helping in any way I can – if they’ll have me. The first is an orphanage that goes by the name of Village Hope, and the other is an LGBTI advocacy group that goes by the name Outright Namibia.  


Visual lounge space in HIV exhibit at Slave Lodge