Oma

My grandmother's life has always been shrouded in mystery. Growing up I knew that there were secrets, secrets which were never resolved. She gave birth to my father in South West Africa, now Namibia, during the fifties. My grandparents were both immigrants from Europe, my grandfather from the Netherlands, my grandmother from Germany.

At the time there were many Europeans in this part of the world due to the Scramble for Africa, where Europe occupied, divided, conquered then abandoned the continent of Africa. Namibia was under German colonial rule from 1884 - 1920. The Germans conquered the territory and ordered the extinction of the native Nama and Herero populations. They destroyed 50% and 80% respectively, they then relinquished control to the British after World War 1. When my grandfather moved to Namibia in the 50s it was under the control of the Nationalists, the South African apartheid government, whose policies extended into Namibia.

My father grew up on a small farm called Nordenburg in a little town called Osakos, about 60 kms from the capital, Windhoek. I was always interested in my European heritage as it seemed so different from my own South African one. I enquired and found out a substantial amount about my Dutch relatives and maintained correspondence with them. Of the German contingent I knew next to nothing. It was not a topic that was broached with my family when I was growing up and it was not a topic that was broached at all, under any circumstances, with my grandmother: 'The past is in the past' we were always told. When my uncle Ernst was 15 his parents sat him down and told him that his father was not his real father, not by blood at least. It did not matter who was, as ‘the past is in the past.’ We realised much later that my grandfather himself did not know who the real father was.

'Oma', as we called her, grew up in a small village called Statdhagen, which bordered Hanover. We do not know where she was born. She never told us. Ernst was always looking for links to his past, something to ground his sense of belonging. When his maternal grandfather passed away from complications to do with Alzheimer's he decided to investigate whether he too was susceptible. However, when he looked he found no genetic trace to his grandfather, and this was how we found out that Oma was adopted. So along with never knowing who

his real father was, he never found out who his real grandparents were either. Ernst's history began and ended with Oma.

When she was 26 Oma packed her possessions: trunks of glasses, cutlery and crockery and 3-year-old Ernst. She then boarded a ship to Cape Town and from there sailed to Namibia. We knew she went to Namibia to follow a man, she would not tell us anything further. Needing more information than this and desperate to help his brother my father hired an investigator in Namibia to find out why Oma left for Namibia and why she came there alone with a young child. We found out she was following a man 30 years her senior — her husband — who she later purported to be Ernst's father. By the time the investigator found the man however it was too late; he had died three years earlier. He had been living in Windhoek the whole time and if Ernst had found out earlier he could easily have made contact and perhaps finally solved the mystery of his parentage.

When Oma found her husband in Namibia he wanted nothing to do with her and she found herself very much alone in a strange country. She looked for a job and eventually found one on a farm as a cleaner. This did not pay well and she started slowly selling all of her possessions to anyone who would buy them. My grandfather heard of her sad story through mutual friends so he went to an engagement party in Osakos where he knew she would be. They met at the party and then started spending more time together. He got her a job working in a shop in a small town close to Osakos called Karibab. She told my grandfather about the man she was married to and they confronted him, asking for a divorce and that my grandfather would have full rights to Ernst as his son. This man never looked up Ernst or showed any interest in him at all. It was only many years later, after Oma had passed away, that we found out my grandfather never believed this was the whole story. He did not believe this man was Ernst's father.

One thing we do know is that something traumatic happened to Oma and she would refuse to speak of it throughout her life. It created a huge schism in her family and she never forgave them. What we know now is that she was young and pregnant, and her adoptive parents were very conservative and strict. To avoid a scandal, they had her married to a man 30 years older, one who had little to no interest in her or her infant son and left her for Africa shortly after their marriage. My grandfather believes the real father was somebody in the family, not related by blood but by marriage. A dentist who was already married to one of Oma's aunts. None of our remaining relatives in Germany will speak about what happened.

My grandfather found an old photograph that my grandmother had kept and brought with her from Germany. In the photograph she is standing in a forest and holding Ernst as a young baby. Over the years he has closely studied this photograph and studied the shadow of the man behind the camera, the man not in the photo. This is not the shadow of the older man, he says, this is the shadow of somebody else. He thinks that this is Ernst's real father, the shadow of the dentist.

Whether there is truth to this, we cannot know.