Andreas ‘Dr Masaba’ Gideon was not only a brave soldier, but he was also a skilled medic and used his lyrical gifts to galvanise and boost morale amongst the rank and file.
Later in his People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (Plan) career, he was known for his singing prowess and was a part of the original Ndilimani Cultural Troupe.
However, his skills extended beyond the microphone, and he has also seen battle both as a fighter and a medic, hence the title Dr.
He was 15 years old when he joined the struggle for liberation in 1975 and was first made a messenger for a senior officer, Ralf, who would later introduce Gideon to battle in 1976.
“If your first battle goes well, you become fearless, but if it goes badly, then you can lose yourself,” he recalled.
Gideon says his first action came at Epinga lyaAbiater when Plan attacked a police station.
“We laid an ambush, and I was instructed to target a young Boer who was about 10 metres away. I shot and made sure he did not survive,” he recalled. The skirmish was a success for Plan, and a young Gideon walked away positive and feeling like a soldier ready to take on any army.
This first positive experience gave him the resolve to keep fighting, even a year later when he was shot twice in battle. He was shot in the armpit and another bullet to the arm at Oshitumba. Utoni Nujoma took him to Okahama for better medical treatment.
Okahama had Cuban doctors.
He said he once saw a young soldier lose his mind after his first encounter in battle went wrong, and he saw his commander shot dead.
“This man started having incoherent speech and just talking nonsense. We later realised that the shock confused him completely,” Gideon recalls.
When he recovered, Gideon was sent to Tobias Hainyeko Training Centre at Lubango for further training.
On the morning of 4 May 1978, the sirens went off.
“We were told to get ready to head for Cassinga,” he recalls, as reinforcements had to be sent after the Apartheid forces bombed Cassinga. The team went to help clear the camp and bury the dead.
Afterwards, with commander Kapoko, he was sent to Oshitumba, where they joined a group of about 30 soldiers. They started training to become the special team, which was later renamed Volcano and then Typhoon.
After the training, Gideon took his first mission of about five, as a commando, into Namibia. This time, they entered through the Kavango region. He was under commander Kambi ‘Hainyeko’, and they were in the areas of Omukekete and Omupoto when they found a Water Affairs (now NamWater) team fixing pumps.
They then decided to hijack the Mercedes-Benz truck and kidnap the team. Stealing an official vehicle seemed like a good idea to irritate the government.
“The problem was, none of us could drive, and we did not trust the government workers to drive us, but we wanted to take it back to Angola,” he recalls.
After initially struggling, they managed to get the truck moving, and by nightfall, they set up camp by the border. By the morning, three of the six captives had run off. But by then, one of the captives offered to drive the truck to allow for a faster escape, since authorities were already alerted to the hijacking.
The hijacking was seen as significant, and other Plan fighters celebrated this little coup.
He was later deployed to join other elite forces in missions south of Tsumeb.
“It was my first time to go south of Oshivelo, and when people say Oshoomeya (as Tsumeb is known in Oshiwambo), I was wondering if it was a town by the seaside,” he laughed as he recalled his thoughts at the time.
The mission was Windhoek, but his team got separated from the larger group, and they went to Otavi.
While in the Otavi area, they got attacked, and some members were shot.
As the medic, he decided to take ‘Mashako’ Angula back to Angola.
He came back to Namibia, and this time the team of guerrillas was detected while in Otjiwarongo, disguised as normal town folk. They were scouting for targets to hit in the town when the authorities found out that there were suspicious-looking people in town.
Dr Masaba in the centre, galvanizing the crowd in the 80s
He was about to be arrested when a young woman pulled him into a bridal shop. Although she was Damara, she had a good command of Oshiwambo and told him to help her fit into the wedding dress.
“When the Boers came into the shop, she spoke to them in Afrikaans, and they left without noticing my pistol,” he recalled. The woman would later tell him that she spent some time in Owamboland because her mother was a nurse there. While his compatriots had to make a run for it and were being shot at, Gideon quietly slipped out of town towards Otavi and went back to Angola.
He again returned to Namibia, but this time it was with Erastus ‘Jicky’ Negonga. The mission was to sabotage the railway line, and they planted explosives to this end.
They were directed, and a trap was set to attack them. Unfortunately, this time around, ‘Mashako’ Angula was killed by a sniper. The rest of the team escaped.
Gideon was later to spend eight consecutive months in the Tsumeb, Otavi, and Grootfontein areas working with the locals and collecting intelligence.
Towards the end of the war, he was asked to join Ndilimani; legend has it that it was at the request of the commander in chief, Sam Nujoma, who was impressed by how Gideon sang liberation songs.
*The Issue’s Combatant project highlights the contributions the forgotten liberation struggle heroes made by profiling former combatants.
