Niya Morangi

The wind here carries memories. I felt it again this morning as I walked through the dry grasses near Okahandja, Namibia, my home. The same sun that scorches the land today once bore witness to my great-grandmother's flight into the Omaheke sands. She left the camp with nothing but willpower, forging survival in a place that wanted no one. If she had faltered, if her resolve had cracked even slightly, there would be no me—no 52 years of life.

When I speak of her, I see the discomfort in people’s eyes. They expect tales of resilience wrapped in triumph, something they can admire from a safe emotional distance. But my great-grandmother’s story isn’t for admiration; it’s a wound, deep and unhealed. Like so many Herero, her story was stolen by colonial violence, her life reduced to a pawn in someone else’s history.

My great-grandfather's story is simpler, if only because the Germans made it so. They hung him from a tree and took everything he had. That’s the extent of what I know—no name for the tree, no marker for the land. Just silence where his life once stood.

I work now as a teacher, and my classroom is a battlefield of its own. When we discuss the genocide, some students grow restless. “Why dwell on the past?” they ask. It’s the same question Germany asks of us, couched in polite bureaucratic language. But the past isn’t dead—it breathes in the way our people struggle to own land, in the uneven access to education, in the chasm of wealth between us and those whose ancestors came here on ships.

Sometimes I think of my great-grandmother in the desert, surrounded by people with nothing left. What would she make of the life I’ve built, the words I fight to teach? I wonder if she’d see it as survival, or merely enduring the same struggle in another form. The wind carries no answers, but it reminds me that silence is the enemy. We must keep speaking.