GERMANY/NAMIBIA: Twenty years after fall of Berlin Wall, Namibian woman raised in East Germany explains how the country saved her life

Record ID: 177283

  • Title: GERMANY/NAMIBIA: Twenty years after fall of Berlin Wall, Namibian woman raised in East Germany explains how the country saved her life
  • Date: 6th November 2009
  • Summary: BERLIN, GERMANY (NOVEMBER 2, 2009) (REUTERS) (SOUNDBITE) (German) STEFANIE-LAHYA AUKONGO, AUTHOR OF BOOK ABOUT HER CHILDHOOD IN EAST GERMANY, SAYING: "I felt like I wanted to go straight back. I couldn't deal with the language or the food. I saw my parents for the first time, and I had never seen so many black people in my life as at the airport. I thought: oh my God." PI
  • Embargoed: 21st November 2009 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Topics: International Relations,People
  • Reuters ID: LVAC838WO6KOEHDXOKOYY24ZIZM3
  • Story Text: Thousands of miles separate Namibia from Germany, the two homes of Stefanie-Lahya Aukongo who has written the book "Kalunga's child, how the GDR saved my life".
    Kalunga is the name of a god worshipped by the people in Ovamboland in the north of Namibia, where Aukongo's parents were based.
    Today, the author lives in Berlin. She was raised in a country divided by the Berlin Wall and spent her childhood in Communist East Germany, also known as the German Democratic Republic, (GDR).
    In May 1978, South African bombers carried out a controversial air attack on the South West Africa People's Organisation (SWAPO) base and refugee camp at Cassinga in Angola.
    Many of those in the camp were Namibian women and children trying to escape the battle for liberation in their country.
    Aukongo's mother Clementine was 16 years old and pregnant with Stefanie at the time of the attack in which she was shot and injured, but survived.
    She was one of 20 Namibians selected to receive medical treatment in Communist East Germany.
    Aukongo was born in an East Berlin hospital in September 1978. She was paralysed down one side of her body as a result of the injuries her mother sustained during the Cassinga attack.
    Petra Schmieder, a young doctor at the hospital persuaded her mother to help care for the Namibian infant.
    After a year, Clementine Aukongo recovered from her injuries and the East German authorities wanted to send the young mother and her baby back to Namibia, where war was still raging. The Schmieder family did not believe baby Stefanie would survive there.
    The family battled to keep Stefanie in East Berlin and succeeded through a chance meeting with Margot Honecker, then public education minister in East Germany.
    Aukongo was one and a half years old and this was the start of a happy childhood in East Berlin, where she was the only black child in her neighbourhood. But Aukongo remembers that the colour of her skin was never important for her.
    "Of course I grew up in a German family, a white German family and you couldn't really hide me away or tell me any kind of stories about whether I belonged to them or not. But I never really had the feeling that something wasn't right," she said.
    After the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, 11-year-old Aukongo noticed changes and now says the differences weren't always positive.
    "There were areas which I couldn't, shouldn't or wouldn't want to visit. There were changes which I noticed," she said.
    Aukongo returned to Namibia when she was 14 years old. By now, the African country that was home to her parents was a foreign land to the author.
    "I felt like I wanted to go straight back. I couldn't deal withe the language or the food. I saw my parents for the first time, and I had never seen so many black people in my life as at the airport. I thought: oh my God," Aukongo said.
    Back home in Germany, Aukongo says she is influenced both by reunified Germany and Namibia.
    "I've lived for the longest amount of time in reunified Germany and so for me, there are two countries which have influenced me. That is Namibia and the Germany that we live in today. Moving between the two of them is enough," Aukongo said.
    Aukongo became a German citizen in 1995 and has just finished studying public management. She now hopes to work for an aid organisation.
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