We have been so fortunate to be working at a primary school in the township of Katutura. Here's some excerpts from our group paper about our school profile, enjoy!
Katutura
Katutura is an outer township near the present capital city of Windhoek in the Khomas region of Namibia. During the time of Apartheid, Namibia was known as Southwest Africa and was under South African jurisdiction, controlled by the government that still operates South Africa. Katutura was founded in 1961 when the government of South Africa wanted to further remove the African population from inside the populated cities of Southwest Africa. Much like the ghettos that were in place in America during times of segregation, Katutura was founded to not only separate the black population from the white population, but also to separate the different tribes within the local population.
If you drive through Katutura today you can still see the marks of segregation on several houses. When the government forcibly moved the black residents of Southwest Africa into Katutura, they marked their houses with a letter that delegated what tribe the people living within the house belonged to. For example a ‘D’ on the front of a house would mean the family inside was of Damara decent, an ‘H’ meant Herero, and an ‘O’ meant Owambo. Even the name of the township shows the segregation that was put in place during its founding; Katutura roughly translated means, “The place we do not want to live.”
After Namibia gained independence in 1990 the new government invited Namibians from the North to come to Windhoek to work with the promise of a house, garden space and a new job. Thousands of people flooded into Windhoek and took up residence within the main city and the outlying township of Katutura looking for work and the new life that the government had promised. In 2007 the small township of Katutura had an official population of 40,000 people, but due to the high mobility of residents the unofficial estimates were closer to 200,000 people.
A.I. Steenkamp Primary School is a Namibian government school that serves pre-primary through grade seven learners in Katutura. The school’s motto is “fiat lux – let there be light” and the school’s mission is “to provide the best quality education and to help our learners to seek the light for a better tomorrow”. School is scheduled to begin each morning at 7:20 and end in the afternoon at 13:10. Each morning, teachers meet prior to class time for morning devotions where they pray, sing, and communicate school information. Although classes are scheduled to begin at 7:20, morning devotions often run over the allotted time and so class does not start until around 7:30. Steenkamp has approximately 1,400 learners and forty staff members. Class size ranges from anywhere between thirty-five to forty-five students. The school is organized so that students are divided between five classes per grade. For instance, grade four will divide their students up into five different classes labeled 4-A through 4-E. Learners are divided amongst these five classes based on their competency in academics, where four-A has the students who have the highest grades and four-E has the students with the lowest grades. Each specific grade has one individual staff member known as the Grade Head. This individual is responsible for writing the grade’s curriculum for each subject a week ahead of time, then all teachers in that specific grade will follow the curriculum written for him or her.
As A.I. Steenkamp is a government school, the education is free to the students. Each student receives eight books that they are responsible for covering with plastic at home. Students are also required to buy their own homework book and buy their school uniforms. As mandated by the government, all students’ workbooks are to be audited by the district inspector so that there is proof that teachers are having their students do work during school. For instance, the principle at A.I. Steenkamp reminded teachers to use the workbooks in class because if there is no writing in the books then “the ministry will think they have learned nothing”. Therefore teachers and administrators emphasize the use of the workbooks in the classroom.
I thought this would be interesting to post. The definition of family is very different to Namibians than it is in the States:
The family composition in this country is very different than what we would consider traditional in the United States. Many of our students live in a house with a mother, aunt, or grandmother and it is very typical for a female family member to be raising multiple children whom are her nieces, nephews, or grandchildren. It is not uncommon for our learners to consider an aunt as their mother and their cousins as sisters and brothers. Their parents are the women and men in their lives that have raised them, not necessarily their biological parents. It was incredibly interesting to hear the teachers at Steenkamp explain that many students have no relationship with their biological fathers and are being raised by their aunts and uncles whom have many children living under one roof. Every living situation in each class is different, but the westernized concept of the “nuclear family” is rarely prevalent for learners at Steenkamp.
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