Kind Nr. 95: Meine deutsch-afrikanische Odyssee

Lucia Panduleni Engombe:
Kind Nr. 95: Meine deutsch-afrikanische Odyssee
Berlin: Ullstein Taschenbuchverlag, 2004
256 S.
ISBN 978-3-548-25892-8
(Original paperback edition)

Lucia Engombe is seven years old and lives in a Zambian refugee camp called Nyango, a place that she would later remember as the African jungle. One day a white man there asks her, "Do you want to fly to Germany with me?" In December 1979 Lucia together with other children is brought to a countryside mansion, now transformed to a children's home in Bellin, East Germany. Even though many of the new impressions have a strange, even eerie feel to them and Lucia feels that she is at the mercy of the German educators, she experiences her life in the new surroundings as luxurious because "in Germany there is always enough to eat." Lucia finds out from a SWAPO – officer why she and the other children were brought to East Germany: they are to be educated to become Namibia's "new elite".

After the radical political upheavals in Germany and Namibia in 1989 Lucia is unexpectedly flown back to Africa where she suddenly finds herself in a strange and exotic world. She is a stranger in Namibia because after eleven years of education at a German boarding school she has long since become a German herself. Lucia is a young adult without her own cultural identity. Without any connection to her parents and possessing only vague memories of the "African jungle", Lucia finds herself again in Ovamboland, in the isolation of the desert landscape and the dreary rural life of the native inhabitants. For Lucia, this is the start of confronting far reaching cultural clashes with her parents and her family and of a search for her own cultural identity.

In the autobiographical story "Child No. 95 – My German African Odyssey" Lucia Engombe tells of her difficult life journey through the turmoil of the political upheavals in Southwest Africa, of her thirteen year long stay in East Germany and of her return to Namibia on 25 August 1989. Peter Hilliges, author of numerous German novels on Africa gives Engombe's descriptions the finishing touch and makes it possible for the reader to relate to Engombe's experiences on an emotional level. Engombe tells of her life with powerful and often intrepid directness in the language and style of a seventeen-year-old high-school student. The simplicity is striking and Engombes' best descriptions are those of the refugee camp in the "African jungle" and the culture shock she experiences upon her arrival in East Germany. What seems convincing and touching at the beginning of the book gradually loses its impact with the occasionally too detailed and not always comprehensibly described experiences such as the children's pleasure with toothpaste. Other descriptions seem partly macabre, often dehumanizing and unimaginable, especially when they concern the customs in the SWAPO children's home in former East Germany.

As an autobiographical story the book focuses on the persona of Lucia Engombe and the changes she undergoes from an African nature loving child to a black German woman who never had the opportunity to develop her own cultural identity. Her personal story is interwoven with SWAPO's freedom struggle in Namibia and the disintegration of East Germany and thus gains exemplary value. In the dreary every day life of East Germany her memories of Africa fade rapidly and at the same time she looses her ability to speak her mother tongue. For Lucia and the other African children in Bellin it is almost impossible to identify themselves with their country of origin. This is elucidated by their inability to interpret violent attacks of East German youths not as xenophobic and part of a racist mindset: "When I read slogans like 'niggers stink' on the school walls, I found it rather funny; we weren't niggers and did not feel addressed."

Even though Engombe senses society's rejection over the years, she cannot differentiate between it and the arbitrary actions of the teachers and of the dispatched SWAPO officers. Nevertheless the racially motivated attacks by East Germans youths become increasingly evident. As a reason for this, Engombe merely attempts explanations that are based on the supposed privileges of the African children, whereas the rude remarks and fights with East German youth are merely regarded as age related power conflicts while racist overtones are ignored.

Lucia's life story is one of hardship, however not because Engombe is separated from her parents and siblings and grows up in a foreign country which ultimately is a fate that many orphans face. Rather her suffering stems from being sent back to Namibia as an eighteen year old and her inability to communicate on a cultural level with either of her parents or her relatives due to her past experiences. The life world of her family in Namibia remains as incomprehensible to Engombe as her initial impressions of Germany long ago. She thus experiences the second culture shock of her life. Having spent thirteen years in an East German children's home and raised by German educators, the traditional way of life in Namibia seems foreign to her. Certain facts are difficult for her to grasp, such as her fifty-year-old father having a sexual relationship with an eighteen-year-old woman, dogs being prepared as meals in Ovamboland from time to time and her mother having a secret love affair with Sam Nujoma, Namibia's first president. After her long stay in East Germany, she can no longer culturally assimilate these realities and therefore remains a foreigner in her own country.

The life story of Child No. 95 is a light read, written in informal and colloquial language. Nevertheless Lucia Engombe, with Peter Hilliges' help, succeeded in creating a fascinating, autobiographical report which makes an unknown part of German Namibian history accessible to the reader. Because of the description of Engombe's experiences of otherness in both countries, her book makes an important contribution in shedding new light on recent German Namibian history. Her book is also well suited to raise the German reader's interest in the 120 year old common history and to create awareness that there is a shared past at all.