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Winter 2003

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Profile: Finding unity in diversity

Marietta Pritchard




	Mosé Tjitendero ’77G, speaker of the Namibian parliament (photo by Ben Barnhart)

I SPENT MY 19TH BIRTHDAY in exile in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania” says Mosé Tjitendero. “My father had no objection to my leaving Namibia, but asked when I would be back.” Five years, the son had replied. That was in 1964. In the end it was 27 years, and by the time he returned, his father had died.

Tjitendero remains in the land of his birth, holding a key political role as speaker of Namibia’s national assembly. It has been a long and arduous journey, with part of it spent as a graduate student in the UMass Amherst School of Education’s Center for International Education, where Tjitendero earned his doctorate in 1977. An elegant and dignified presence in a dark suit and bright blue shirt, he visited the campus last spring as part of a trip that also included a conference in Rome on strengthening parliamentary democracies in the new African states.

“When I left my country under the cause of African independence,” he says, “it was clear that young people had to prepare to govern themselves.” Namibia is a country about three times the size of Texas with 1,771,000 people in southwest Africa. It was colonized by Germany in the 19th century; then, after World War I, South Africa was given what Tjintendero describes as “a nebulous mandate” to rule there. From then on South Africa tightened its grip on Namibia, imposing strict apartheid, confining black workers and their families to “reserves.” Liberation movements strongly opposed to this neo-colonial rule merged to form the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO), and it was this organization that the young Mosé Tjitendero joined.

In voluntary exile in Dar es Salaam, he became a radio broadcaster for the liberation movement while finishing his secondary education in a high school created by the refugee students themselves. It was a heady time, a heady political atmosphere. While he was there, both Malcolm X and Robert Kennedy came to visit. It was clear, he says, that negotiated settlements with South Africa “were not the order of the day.” Instead, the leadership of SWAPO said to the young refugees: “Go study, then come back and fight.”

Various educational opportunities presented themselves. Tjitendero was offered scholarships to Norway and Sweden as well as to the Soviet Union. “The majority of African students,” he says, “saw the Eastern European countries as supporting liberation. The U.S. was seen as supporting the oppressors. We were pawns in the Cold War.” Even so, and although he spoke Afrikaans but no English, he accepted an offer to come to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. In January 1967, with two friends, he landed in New York City. He had been asked, “Do you have any warm clothes?” and he’d replied, yes, he had a sweater. “It was blowing and snowing. I had no overcoat.”

Lincoln was a fertile ground for pan-Africanism, Tjitendero says. It was the heyday of the black power and civil rights movements. “There were brothers walking around in dashikis with big Afros,” he says. “It felt great to be part of a nation-building process.” He worked hard and steadily, learning English, attending summer school, finishing his college degree in two years. The next stop was graduate school at the UMass School of Education. One day he ran into a couple of friends from Africa. “This campus was so lily white back then that when you saw a black face, you just started smiling,” he says. It was here in Amherst that he met his African-American wife, Sandra, an early graduate of the BDIC (Bachelor’s Degree in Independent Concentration) program. They are parents of three biological and three adopted children.

“UMass was one of the best things that ever happened to me,” says Tjitendero, describing then-Dean Dwight Allen’s goal as “unity in diversity.”

“The Center for International Education was very outward-looking. We constantly reflected on the third world. The discussions were relevant, not parochial. It was so international, with both cultural and linguistic diversity that it continuously fuelled our needs for a ‘multi-everything’ world.

“The place nourished me,” Tjitendero says, “and didn’t suppress my inner strengths.” He describes the pleasant shock he experienced when he encountered professors who, instead of giving assignments, said: “‘Tell me what you want to examine. We might have some suggestions.’” It was about projects, research, discovery, sharing. “In the real world,” he says, “that’s what you do.”

As the first and only speaker of Namibia’s parliament, Mosé Tjitendero has had the opportunity to “exercise idealism in a chamber where the rights of all members are equal.” Education continues to be his great hope. The challenge ahead, he says, is to continue investment in the people, by educating them. This is not, he says about “certificates or diplomas, but about knowledge, which will allow people to make informed choices.” In the area of health, for instance, “we now have a pandemic of the dreaded AIDS virus, which affects the most vulnerable population. It could be reduced, not cured, but prevented. Education is the key.”

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