Tupa Tjipombo - I Am Not Your Slave: a memoir

WHEN I FIRST MET TUPA at her brothers house on a rutted back road of Opuwo in northwestern Namibia, I was struck by her story. With her obvious intelligence and insight, she told it in a steady, introspective voice and in fluent English. The story she told me was one of trauma and personal survival that left me speechless; her experience of being abducted and trafficked was the most shocking account of modern-day slavery I had ever heard. I resolved to gather her complete story, including the circumstances and deteriorating conditions that put her at risk for trafficking in the first place, the daily brutalities and routine suffering of being a slave, the people involved, the self-doubt, the ambiguities, and the essential determination to be free.

Yet there was something else about Tupas story that struck me. Despite having worked in sub-Saharan Africa for over twenty-five years and encountering many different forms and manifestations of human trafficking that were truly horrific, I still found much of her account breathtakingly shocking. Why had I not heard of so many of these things before? And how could this have happened to an individual from Namibia? The country is as remote as they come, a little-known outlier of vast desert spaces and few people with a sleepy, almost aloof quality to it.

There is so much we do not know about human trafficking, despite the proliferation of books, reports, and other publications on the topic over the past twenty years. It is particularly difficult to find personal accounts of trafficking victims. On the one hand, their voices have been silenced by an overall approach to the issue that is based on an amalgamation of statistics, generic categories, and measurable data. The result is a long stream of tedious reports, boilerplate definitions, and legislative watch lists. Any focus on the individual, which happens only rarely, has more to do with how she or he meets the criteria for a specific definition of trafficking, which, of course, transforms the person into another statistic, another object that can be counted and measured, another immutable, faceless category.

All of this brings me back to Tupa and a long, on-again, off-again conversation held over countless cups of rooibos tea at a kitchen table in a quiet town of northwestern Namibia. Her story is presented here in narrative form because it is the way she herself wanted it to be told. Writing her story was an iterative process, and we continually reviewed particular scenes or events many times over as I prompted her to recall specific details, emotions, sights, sounds, and so forth until we both felt that we had saturated that particular experience. As part of this process, I read back to her everything I wrote, and we carefully went over each section together to make sure I had included and described everything to her satisfaction.

It should be noted here that I was able to confirm much of what happened to her by personally visiting specific locations and interviewing individuals in Namibia, Angola, South Sudan, Djibouti, and the United Arab Emirates. I should also note that Tupa is a pseudonym (as are all names used in the books). From early on, we agreed that we should not use real names to protect Tupas identity and prevent her from additional harm.

There were many challenges to writing Tupas story, but she never wavered in her belief that it should be told. I remember one day, as we sat in her brothers kitchen in Opuwo, poring over the details of one particularly horrific experience of her ordeal, we decided that it was all too much and we needed to take a break for a few days. The room grew silent as I made tea and stared out the window, watching a group of children play soccer. Tupa, sitting at the kitchen table, leafed through a United Nations report on human trafficking that I had happened to bring along that day. When I turned around, she was frantically fumbling with my recorder. How do you turn this on? she said irritably. We must continue. Taken aback, I started to go through all of the reasons why we should take a short hiatus. But she abruptly cut me off. This, she said, holding up the report. It does not say anything. It is not my story. It is not anybodys story. It will not make people act. She pointed to the empty chair opposite her. Sit. I need to finish telling my story.

The result presented here is not a statistic or an exposition but an individual account of modern-day slaveryone womans story of boundless courage in the face of one of the worst human atrocities imaginable.

Chris Lockhart
April 2018
Opuwo, Namibia