Margaret Mensah-Williams

“There were big armoured trucks and the police would teargas you and shoot rubber bullets at you, but these women would tell the officers they would have to cross over the children to get to us,”

“we had some teachers who were soldiers carrying a gun in the classroom.”

“I did not understand why people would ask whose children my father was walking with, so I started asking questions”

“That, I think, galvanised me, and I said to myself: ‘I am going to become a lawmaker one day.’ That is where the passion started,”

“These people had numbers around their neck. I found this disgraceful. I remember asking my father: ‘Why don’t they have names, what will happen to them when they die? Their families won’t know about it, because they have no names’.”

“It carried black men from the north who were migrant workers. White people, who were the oppressors at the time, would stand there and they would call: ‘Number 5, Number 20…’”

“In the little town where I grew up the only thing we could do was to go and watch a train passing by on a Sunday evening. That was our excursion for the week”

“I made history and now it gives me tremendous peace and happiness to contribute to the moulding and grooming of other women”

“As we commemorate CASSINGA day let us remember our Mothers, Fathers, Daughters and Sons who continue to water our freedom with the blood of their sacrifice. May the memory of CASSINGA always spur us on to pursue a future of peace and prosperity for all NAMIBIANS . Long live heroes and Heroines of CASSINGA. Long live the memory of our struggle.”

“When we draw from the deepest fissures inside us, we become a fresh breeze that lifts the souls of other people. You have been a restorative wind in the lives of many, locally and internationally. A voice of kindness and wisdom beseeching one to become the fullest of being. A synthesis of all the good in the world, a person who encircles the rocky strewn bank of human existence and embraces it with a loving and a gentle heart. A person who recognizes the value of living free from anxiety and want, who lives gracefully without desire and attachment.”