He was born in Oniimwandi, Oshana Region, Northern Namibia, on 9 August 1943, and grew up in Lüderitz and later Windhoek. He joined the independence movement SWAPO at the age of 18 and later moved to Germany on a journalism scholarship. He was one of the first black journalists of Namibia, and the first editor of the SWAPO-owned periodical Namibia Today. With Tor Sellström, he published the book ’Kassinga: A Story Untold’ in 1995, an account of the 1978 massacre by the South African military of hundreds of Namibians in a refugee camp in Angola. He was a Special Advisor to the Namibian Ministry of Information and Communication Technology,[1] and died on 25 April 2019 in Tauben Glen, Windhoek as a result of complications from a stroke the previous year.[1]
Quotes
The beginning lines of the poem From Exile (version 1992) are
From exile when I return
I’m going to beg someone to touch me
very, very tenderly
Ya Nangolo, Mvula; Sellström, Tor (1995). Kassinga : a story untold. Windhoek: Namibia Book Development Council. OCLC475610224. 81 pages. Account.
Ya Nangolo, Mvula (2008). Watering the beloved desert : new and selected poems. Makanda: Brown Turtle Press. ISBN9780982166000. OCLC1289890799. 60 pages. Poetry.
Beier, Ulli; Moore, Gerald (2007). The Penguin book of modern African poetry. Penguin classics (4th ed.). London: Penguin Books. ISBN9780140424720. OCLC466152546. 448 pages. First edition 1998.
Chipasula, Frank Mkalawile (1985). When my brothers come home : poems from central and southern Africa. Middletown, Connecticut, USA / Scranton, Pennsylvania, USA: Wesleyan University Press. Distributed by Harper & Row. ISBN9780819550927. OCLC10072530. 278 pages.
Okoro, Dike (2012). We have crossed many rivers : new poetry from Africa. Lagos, Nigeria: Malthouse Press. ISBN9789788244325. OCLC809615834. 346 pages.
Opali, Fred (2010). "Poetic form and the construction of meaning in the poetry of Mvula ya Nangolo". In Makokha, J. K. S.; Barasa, Remmy; Daramola, Adeyemi (eds.). Tales, tellers and tale-making : critical studies on literary stylistics and narrative styles in contemporary African literature. Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller. ISBN9783639311372. OCLC1302249691.
^ abc"Mvula Ya Nangolo-Namibia | Revue Noire". www.revuenoire.com. Revue Noire, Contemporary Expressions from Africa and Worldwide, BICFL s.a.s., Paris, France. Retrieved 7 November 2024.