The kids were stuffing their pockets with snow. They thought it was sugar
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Nuuyoma Jonas Nepolo was born on 5 March 1955 in the Elimi municipality in the Omusati region in northern Namibia. He grew up during South Africa’s domination of Namibia when the country was under a racist apartheid regime. The witness and his classmates fled to Angola in 1977, where he joined the SWAPO liberation movement. After military training, he worked as a logistics officer in the Lubango refugee camp. In 1979, he was transferred to Lusaka, Zambia, to study pedagogy and become a teacher, having taught in refugee camps during his studies. In 1985, he flew to Czechoslovakia as the group leader of fifty-six Namibian children and four tutors as part of international aid to the Marxist SWAPO movement, which was fighting for Namibia’s independence from South Africa at the time. The aim was to raise the children to be Namibia’s elite. In Czechoslovakia, he served as deputy headmaster of a school for Namibian children in Bartošovice (1985 to 1988) and Prachatice (1988 to 1990). In April 1990 - after Namibia gained independence - he went on holiday to visit his family in Angola. The authorities then prevented him from returning to the children in Czechoslovakia. A group of Namibian children were repatriated to Namibia the following year. After his return to Namibia, he continued teaching. He later joined the police, where he served in a leadership position until 2015 when he retired. In 2022, he lived in the Ongwediva municipality in northern Namibia.
