The Old Location was never a place its residents had chosen freely. The Windhoek City Council created it in 1912 and ordered all the city's Black residents into it; a year later, officials laid out streets and split the population by ethnicity, forcing each group into a separate section. And yet, within those imposed lines, a real community grew. At its heart stood the St Barnabas Anglican Church School, whose pupils would go on to shape a nation — among them Clemens Kapuuo, Mburumba Kerina, Kuaima Riruako, and a young man named Sam Nujoma. People built homes here, raised families, and held title to their own erven. It was theirs in every way that mattered, and the school that anchored it would later be destroyed when the location was closed.

When South Africa's National Party brought apartheid to South West Africa, then governed as its de facto fifth province, the plan for the Old Location followed the logic of segregation to its conclusion. But the residents had concrete reasons to resist beyond principle. In the Old Location they owned their land; in Katutura, every plot would belong to the municipality. The new plots were smaller, too cramped even for the gardens that had fed families. And where the Old Location sat within walking distance of work, Katutura's eight-kilometer remove meant paying daily bus fare on wages that were already meager. The move would make people poorer, more dependent, and further away. They understood exactly what was being done to them, and they said no.

The newly formed SWANU party helped organize the resistance, and the residents launched a boycott of municipal services. On 10 December 1959 the protest came to a head, and the South West Africa Police opened fire on the crowd. Eleven people were killed and forty-four wounded. Among the dead was Anna Mungunda — known as Kakurukaze — a domestic worker who, in the chaos, set fire to the car of the location superintendent and was shot down for it. Today she is honored as a National Hero of Namibia, her grave at the Heroes' Acre. The cruelty did not end with the shooting. At the city's hospitals, doctors turned the wounded away, telling them to "go to the United Nations for treatment, because these people are political patients."

Between three and four thousand people fled the Old Location and refused to return, afraid of further reprisals. The killings hardened resolve rather than breaking it. They drove community leaders — Sam Nujoma among them — into exile, and out of that exile grew SWAPO, the movement that would carry the fight for independence across the next three decades. Nujoma, who would later become Namibia's founding president and who died in 2025, never let the memory fade; he wrote of that day in his own account of the struggle. The transfer to Katutura ground on for years, and the Old Location was officially closed in 1968. Namibia did not become free until March 1990, thirty-one years after the shooting. The nation marks the anniversary still: every 10 December is Human Rights Day, a holiday born from the people who would not be moved.