Margaret Mensah-Williams

Biography

Margaret Natalie Mensah-Williams (born 25 December 1961) is a Namibian politician, diplomat, and prominent SWAPO member. She currently serves as Namibia's ambassador to the United States. Mensah-Williams also served as a councillor of Windhoek's Khomasdal North constituency from 1998 until 2019, and from this position was elected to represent Khomas Region in the National Council, the upper house of the Namibian Parliament from 2015 to 2019. In the National Council she was elected deputy chairperson in 1998, and chairperson in 2015. She resigned from all regional representative positions prior to the 2019 Namibian general election in order to contest for a seat in the National Assembly, Namibia's lower house, and subsequently became a member of Parliament.

Quotes

• 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.

Congratulations on a magnificent year of reign and may this new chapter of your life be nothing short of the grace & favour of God.

• • [1]
• 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.
  • [2]
• I made history and now it gives me tremendous peace and happiness to contribute to the moulding and grooming of other women
  • [3]
• 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
  • [4]
• 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…’
  • [5]
• 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’.
  • [6]
• 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,
  • [7]
• I did not understand why people would ask whose children my father was walking with, so I started asking questions
  • [8]
• we had some teachers who were soldiers carrying a gun in the classroom.
  • [9]
• 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,
  • [10]
• I found there was a tremendous strength and power in that, to actually be willing to sacrifice their children. And those trucks would come. I would close my eyes and they would stop just before they hit the children.
  • [11]
• I made history and now it gives me tremendous peace and happiness to contribute to the moulding and grooming of other women to also become members of the top echelon of our society.
  • [12]
• The way we women argue, the way we make laws, is different from the way men parliamentarians do it most of the time, because we think with our heads but we feel with our hearts
  • [13]
• 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.

Congratulations on a magnificent year of reign and may this new chapter of your life be nothing short of the grace & favour of God.

• • [14]
• 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.
  • [15]