When you ask me about the bravery of the Nama women, I will tell you, it lies in stories untold, in her curves, when she sways, the wind moves with her, so certain in her walk, her bravery can never be missed, just one look at her face, the wrinkles that cover her face with of deep knowledge waving on her her face, her face, that was described by a writer from 1968 as “the nose is broad and barely distinguishable at its base, which appears ugly to us.”
These faces, bodies that have learned suffering in their bones. From holding families together, it is the Nama women who held communities, fed the hungry, and kept all warm in the very house she made with her bare hands, as far as it can be remembered.
The Nama women’s power was undermined and taken away by colonizers who refused to acknowledge their role when they only wanted to make “deals” with men, deals of selling guns for land, deals that resulted in people being enslaved by the master in their own land.
The bravery of a Nama woman can be told from genocide camps when they were forced to clean the skulls of their husbands with blades, scraping off skin and hair, in their hands, the heads of their loved ones.
Because the Germans needed to make experiments to prove a superior race. For years, they cleaned, never resting feet, raising children of the master, never raising their own, so when you ask me about the bravery of Nama women, I say It lies within her bones, so when you think her voice is a bit louder, it comes from deep truth and knowledge, when you think she is bolder, it comes from stories untold. A Nama woman stands, everyone stands, she heals, she carries, she loves, she is loud and rightfully so.
In September 2024, my colleagues Kedireng Garises, then Chairperson of University of Namibia’s Action Research Team, and Immogene Classen, Y-Fem’s Community Facilitator for Hardap region, and I went to Gibeon as part of the collaborative partnership between Y-Fem Namibia Trust, which I worked for as Programs Manager at the time, and the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, to advance social justice and healing through participatory, feminist, and decolonial research. Y-Fem’s approach centered around systemic and structural gender-based violence of Indigenous women, specifically Damara and Nama, and intergenerational trauma from colonial dominance through state policy. The focus was on Nama women’s voices, highlighting their role in community advocacy, cultural revitalization, preservation, and healing.
The Nama women shared personal stories, offering deep insights into the intergenerational impact of colonial trauma and oppression both by German colonization and the South African apartheid occupation. One of the most powerful themes to emerge was the demand for reparative justice not just to be symbolic or economic, but also to include recognition and preservation of the Nama language, healing cultural practices, and the revitalization of Indigenous knowledge systems lost due to colonization.
As a child, I watched people go to cemeteries not just to mourn, but to visit. They would carry two-liter bottles of water and place them carefully in front of the crosses marking graves. No one explained why. It was a practice that seemed sacred and entirely ordinary at once, a custom that eventually disappeared from my current reality, swallowed up by the silence that colonization and modernity bring to Indigenous rituals. Years later, in the heart of this project, that memory returned to me not as nostalgia, but as a call to recover what was almost lost. This project became my doorway into a deeper knowing that rests in nature, in the palms of old women, in the stories that resist erasure.
My journey began with the voices of Damara and Nama women at the initial meeting with Elders, healers, religious leaders, and other women whose knowledge is held in their bones. They welcomed me not only as a participatory feminist researcher, but as their daughter who was eager to learn from them. They offered stories not as distant history, but as living maps. As one of the Elders shared, “We have the knowledge of healing, but it must be held again by our children, or it will go.” We named the project “Uts Ha-e !kho/gara its #gau#gausen: Hold onto what you have and heal yourselves.” And in that naming, something opened. A sacred responsibility formed not just to record knowledge, but to carry it, live it, and let it guide healing.
One of the Elders shared, “We have the knowledge of healing, but it must be held again by our children, or it will go.”
Naming Power: A Gendered Legacy
Gibeon is a small southern town 338 kilometers from Namibia’s capital city of Windhoek. A welcome sign bearing the image of the Namibian and Nama hero, Captain !Nanseb Hendrik Witbooi, greets all who enter the town. The image of his distinctive hat and determined gaze is etched into every Namibian’s memory, familiar from schoolbooks on the National War of Resistance and now featured on Namibian currency. My interest was in Nama women’s legacy, the memory of the brave women who became leaders.
A story known locally in Gibeon is the story of /Aaoxuris. The story goes, during the time of German colonization, during one of the attacks on Gibeon, the Germans came and put everyone in the genocide camps, setting fire to land, burning cattle, and shooting people, and there was a lot of blood. While this was happening, a woman went into labor and gave birth to a baby girl. This stopped the killing. Born in blood, she was named /Aoxuris, meaning the one who gathered the blood. With the child’s arrival, it was believed that peace had come.
The Nama women, retelling the story as they had heard it from their grandparents, called for a monument to her, a place of remembrance for women, as they, too, lived bravely. Women are caretakers of memory and healing, language, and spirituality. They are also burdened with grief over lost land, lost youth, and being left out of formal narratives of reparations. In both individual interviews and focus groups, I heard repeatedly, “We were rich. We had cattle, land, herbs, dignity. They took everything.” This project revealed how gender intersects deeply with historical dispossession. In the stories of queer participants in the LGBTQ+ focus group, the marginalization was doubled. Their land was taken, and they still struggle for recognition of their identities. “Our ancestors are buried in this land, too,” one participant said, “but we are rarely called to speak when land is discussed.”
Memory, Wealth, and Loss
I grew up in Stampriet, a small Nama town in the south 150 km from Gibeon, which mirrors it in its structures: the church, the school, the clinic, the boxy houses painted in fading colors. These were houses built by the apartheid government in the 1950s and ‘60s, now falling apart, holding Elders who are often left to carry families, unemployed youth, and grandchildren with mere $1,300 assistance (around $80 USD) from the government. These houses were built to hold nuclear families—a father, a mother, and a child—not keeping in mind the extensiveness of African families. Some homes have been renovated with pension funds or by educated children who returned, but most remain in their original state, decaying with no renovations since Namibia’s independence.
When we spoke about reparations, a deep pain filled the room. The women remembered being rich not in currency, but in cattle, land, and abundance. “We didn’t lack,” one woman said, “until they took the cattle and pushed us into this dust.” They weren’t just speaking of material loss. It was a dispossession of time, space, and dignity. What remains is land that doesn’t bloom easily and memory that aches to be recognized. Patricia, a respected Elder in Gibeon, detailed how her great-grandmother fled with children during the genocide and how her grandfather lost his cattle. But Patricia also represents the continuity of knowledge; she teaches young girls about their bodies, menstruation, and faith. Her loss did not harden her. It deepened her resolve.
Our time in Gibeon and the truths that we witnessed there affirm the profound bravery and enduring resilience of Nama women. Reparative justice must extend beyond economic and symbolic gestures to include the recognition and revitalization of the Nama language, healing practices, and Indigenous knowledge and women’s leadership.
Irene ǁGaroës (Nama) is a feminist leader, activist, and writer. She is Programmes and Innovations Manager at Y-Fem Namibia Trust.
All photos courtesy of Irene //Garoës.
