A Name Still Owed: The Case for Renaming Katima Mulilo Campus

EDITORIAL

The Caprivi Vision  |  Friday, 11 September 2026

Thirteen years ago, this newspaper put its name behind a demand that has still not been answered. In our 27 September 2013 editorial, “Simbwaye must be honoured,” we argued that the late Brendan Kangongolo Simbwaye — CANU founder, SWAPO’s first vice president, and a man who vanished into police custody in 1972 without ever receiving a grave his family could visit — deserved more than the quiet, scattered recognition Namibia had so far given him. We noted then that a primary school and a naval vessel bore his name, alongside Brendan Simbwaye Square in Windhoek, but that this fell short of what his sacrifice warranted. We called on government to help “bring the whole issues of the Caprivi to an end,” including the unresolved question of his disappearance.

That editorial was written for a different moment, when the demand was mainly about truth and remembrance. It followed a report this paper carried the same week, in which Palanyana Simbwaye, the late leader’s nephew, described affidavits he had gathered pointing to how his uncle had died, and appealed directly to government to investigate. “We want true history,” he told this paper, insisting the family held knowledge no official record yet captured. He named Wenela, on the Namibia–Zambia border, as the site where he believed his uncle and other missing comrades had been buried, and pressed the Ministry of Veterans Affairs to join the family in locating the grave. The Ministry’s response at the time, through Permanent Secretary Ambassador Ipinge, was that it lacked the documentation to act without the family coming forward.  “ I’m therefore requesting Simbwaye’s family to bring those documents to us so that we can investigate together with the police to get Comrade Simbwaye’s grave so that we can give him a better burial” said Mr. Ipinge . On behalf of late Simbwaye’s family, Palanyana was quoted saying “ we are reminding government to continue spearheading the monument as stated by founding father Dr. Sam Nujoma”That appeal, like the renaming question, has never been formally closed.

The state has, since then, gone some way toward the recognition the family sought. When Namibia marked its 34th Independence Anniversary in Katima Mulilo on 21 March 2024, then-President Nangolo Mbumba named Simbwaye directly alongside fellow Caprivian Greenwell Matongo, crediting both with helping open, as he put it, “the door to independence, for all Namibians.” He told the gathered crowd that Namibia’s freedom had been won partly through the sacrifice of Zambezi’s own sons, who he said had crossed “many rivers of blood along the way.” It was, by any measure, the clearest national acknowledgement Simbwaye had received from a sitting head of state on Zambezi soil. But an anniversary speech is not an institution, and words spoken once a year fade faster than a name carved into a gate.

Today the same unfinished business has taken a new shape: a long-running call to rename the Katima Mulilo Campus of the University of Namibia after Simbwaye. It is time this newspaper said plainly where it stands.

We believe the campus should carry his name.

The argument is not sentimental. Simbwaye was born and educated in this region; his political life began here, and his disappearance remains one of the Zambezi Region’s deepest unresolved wounds. A university campus is not a ship or a square — it is where the next generation of Caprivians will spend their most formative years. Naming it after a son of this soil who died for the right of that generation to be educated freely is not decoration. It is instruction.

We are aware of the counter-arguments, and we do not dismiss them. Renaming carries real administrative cost — signage, letterheads, institutional records — money that some will rightly ask whether the region can spare when campus infrastructure and student bursaries remain underfunded. Others will note that “Katima Mulilo Campus” is a clean, recognisable geographic name with its own institutional value, and that changing it risks confusion just as the campus expands its wildlife and conservation programmes into a regional hub. Still others may point out that Simbwaye was not the only Caprivian to give his life in CANU’s cause, and ask why he, and not another, should be singled out.

These are fair questions, and none of them should be waved away by government or by UNAM Council. But none of them, in our view, outweigh the deeper cost of continued silence: a generation of students graduating from a campus in Simbwaye’s own region without ever being told, formally and permanently, why his name matters.

A sharper objection also circulates, and it deserves to be named rather than avoided. Some argue that Simbwaye’s own struggle was for an independent Caprivi Strip, not for South West Africa now Namibia , and question how closely he was ever actually bound to SWAPO. It is true that Simbwaye had already been detained by South African security forces by the time the CANU–SWAPO merger was concluded on 5 November 1964, and that it was his contemporary, Mishake Muyongo — then CANU’s Vice President — who is named in several accounts as the one who signed the agreement alongside Sam Nujoma, later serving as SWAPO’s Vice President until his expulsion. Simbwaye, for his part, was installed as SWAPO Vice President in absentia while still in detention. The mainstream historical record treats him as SWAPO’s man in this period regardless, but the dispute over who truly carried CANU into the merger, and on what terms, is real, still argued over in Zambezi living rooms, and is part of why the renaming question has never been as simple as it looks from Windhoek.

That same argument is sometimes carried further by some in the region, who point to Muyongo’s role at the signing table as reason enough that he, too, deserves formal recognition — not instead of Simbwaye, but alongside him. It is a case made, by those who hold it, in full awareness of what came after: 2 August 1999, Muyongo was implicated as a leading figure behind an armed secessionist uprising aimed at breaking the Caprivi Region away from Namibia, was indicted for high treason, and has lived in exile in Denmark ever since, having never stood trial. Those who make this argument do not ask government to overlook that history; they contend his earlier decades of liberation work, including his part in negotiating Caprivi’s place inside the movement that won Namibia’s independence, should not be erased by what came after. This newspaper does not adopt that position. The treason indictment against Muyongo remains a serious, unresolved matter of law, not a closed chapter of history, and any call for his recognition would need to reckon with that fact directly rather than around it. We record the argument here only because leaving it out would give readers an incomplete picture of why the renaming question divides Katima Mulilo as sharply as it does.

We must, however, be honest about where some of this resistance actually comes from. A number of the objections raised against the renaming are not really about Simbwaye at all — they are about preservation versus the honouring of any single icon, a caution against erasing an established place-name to elevate one individual, however deserving. We understand this concern, and we understand too the discomfort it sits alongside: residents of Katima Mulilo still recall that the street once known as Induna Imukusi Street was itself renamed, to Hage Geingob Street, after Dr Hage Geingob — then Prime Minister of Namibia, who later served as the country’s third President and has since passed away. If precedent already exists for a name in this town to be retired in honour of a national leader, the argument that place-names must never yield to individual honour does not hold as firmly as some suggest.

Even so, we accept that renaming the campus outright may not be the only, or even the best, path to closing this chapter. What we called for in 2013 — that the highest offices of this country help close the unfinished chapter of the Caprivi’s liberation history — remains unmet, and it need not be settled by campus signage alone. We therefore call on government to consider honouring Simbwaye the way it has honoured other giants of the liberation struggle, among them Founding President Sam Nujoma: with a statue, standing in Katima Mulilo, where his own people can see him. A monument does not carry the same risk of institutional disruption a renaming does, yet it answers the preservationists and the honour-seekers alike — Simbwaye remembered in stone, on his own soil, without erasing what already stands.

We call on the UNAM Council, the Zambezi Regional Council and the Ministry of Education to open a formal, transparent public process that weighs renaming, a statue, or both — one that hears the objections as seriously as the calls for honour — and to bring it to a decision. Thirteen years is long enough to wait for the monument.

— The Editor, Mashete Lumamezi