For 30 years the ever-smiling Sam Nujoma expertly played the double game of shuttle diplomat and agitator of Namibia’s guerilla war of independence.
Fleeing from the territory in March 1960 to escape the kind of long imprisonment that befell Nelson Mandela in neighbouring South Africa, Nujoma crisscrossed the continent to garner support — and guns — from sympathetic states while working to gain recognition for an independent Namibia from the United Nations.
The territory’s story of colonial exploitation had been as sad and bad as any in Africa from when it was established as the German territory of South West Africa in 1884. Resistance to the colonial yoke from indigenous people led to the first genocide of the 20th century between 1904 and 1908, when tens of thousands were killed by German soldiers.
In 1915 German rule was overthrown and the territory came under the mandate of the colony of South Africa, confirmed by the newly formed League of Nations after the First World War. By the time Nujoma grew to manhood in the late 1940s, South Africa was about to impose draconian apartheid laws in the territory.
A disaffected former railway worker, Nujoma was already at the heart of the struggle when in December 1959 people were forcibly removed from Windhoek Old Location to a new township called Katatura (“the place where we shall never settle”). Police killed 12 protesters and another 50 were wounded. Nujoma was arrested for sedition. While awaiting trial he went into exile on March 1, 1960, and in April founded the South West African People’s Organisation (Swapo).
A handsome and dignified figure, Nujoma travelled through what was then British Bechuanaland (Botswana), Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Tanganyika (Tanzania), Kenya and Sudan, ending in Ghana. At the same time he started to plan a guerilla war against his homeland’s South African overlords.
Fighting began in 1966 and many young Namibians volunteered. The Soviet Union sent weapons to the Marxist idealogue Nujoma and provided training for the guerillas, as did Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt and Marshal Tito in Yugoslavia; Scandinavian countries provided humanitarian assistance.
South Africa dealt brutally with insurgents, equipping the notorious Koevoet police unit that displayed the bodies of dead Swapo guerillas on the mudguards of their armoured trucks. Swapo itself enforced a rigid discipline, dealing harshly with dissidents within its ranks who had grown disenchanted with Nujoma’s leadership.
Nujoma adopted the nom de guerre, Shafiishuna, (meaning lightning), but in reality did no fighting himself. In 1971 he became the first leader of a black African nationalist movement to address the United Nations Security Council in New York. Two years later the UN recognised Swapo as the “sole and authentic” representative of the Namibian people and three years after that Security Council Resolution 385 demanded free elections in Namibia and South Africa’s withdrawal.
Protracted negotiations began between South Africa and a “Contact Group” of five states — Britain, Canada, France, the US and West Germany. The counterpoint was an escalating war, which included the “Cassinga incident” of May 1978, when South African forces attacked a Swapo camp at Cassinga, inside Angola, killing 600 people. The apartheid regime in Pretoria claimed that its control of “South West Africa was necessary to stem the advance of Marxist Africa”, especially from the heavily Cuban-backed People’s Republic of Angola.
Skirmishes would continue until 1988, when the UN finally brokered a deal in which 50,000 Cuban troops (which had supported Nujoma’s guerillas) would leave Angola in exchange for South Africa’s withdrawal from South West Africa. Newly independent Namibia would then hold elections.
And despite the best efforts of the dying apartheid regime in South Africa to promote alternative candidates, Nujoma became Namibia’s first democratically elected president in 1990.
Sam Nujoma was born in 1929 in the village of Etunda in the Ongandjera district of the Omusati Region of South West Africa to Daniel Uutoni Nujoma and Mpingana-Helvi Kondombolo. He was the eldest of 11 children whose parents, subsistence farmers, both came from royal families. As a child he looked after his parents’ cattle, often with one of his baby siblings wrapped on his back. After Nujoma shot a hartebeest in the veld, village elders proclaimed that he was destined for greatness.
Nujoma was educated at the Okahao Finnish Missionary Society’s school from 1937 to 1945. Later he moved to Windhoek, where he worked on the railways from 1949 and learnt English at night school, his earlier studies having been largely in Afrikaans. Nujoma’s political consciousness grew from his discovery of the vicious labour practices of the railways, from which he resigned in 1957 to devote himself to politics. “Colonialism was terrible here,” Nujoma recalled. “African children were told that they had half a brain of those of the white.”
To establish regional branches of his proto-resistance movement, Nujoma broke the Pass laws, restricting the free movement of blacks and forcing them to carry identity documents with permits to travel outside set areas.
From making his first petition to the UN in New York in June 1960, Nujoma claimed his first big diplomatic coup seven years later when the UN terminated South Africa’s mandate (opposed only by Britain) and set up the UN Council for SWA. In 1971 the International Court of Justice performed a volte-face on earlier judgments and issued an “advisory opinion” that South Africa’s presence in SWA was illegal.
During the years of exile Nujoma returned only once to his homeland, when in 1966 he tested South African claims that it was open to the exiles to return. He was arrested, and on March 21 deported. Twenty-four years later he was to declare March 21 Namibia’s independence day. Nujoma had hoped to be reunited with his wife Kovambo Theopoldine Katjimune, whom he had married in 1956. She eventually escaped via Botswana to join him in exile in December 1977. They had three sons and a daughter. The daughter died in infancy and the second son died in 1993.
Nujoma returned to Namibia for good in September 1989, having signed the ceasefire agreement on March 19. Forswearing his earlier ideas of a Marxist one-party state, he won the November elections, with his party gaining 41 of the 72 seats.
Assuming the role of amiable man of the people in his colourful tracksuits, Nujoma won re-election in 1994 with a bigger majority, but his stewardship of the virgin nation was increasingly controversial. He grew increasingly autocratic and altered the constitution in 1999 to allow him a third term in office.
Disorder was dealt with harshly and in March 2001 police rounded up all homosexuals in Namibia, prompted by new Aids figures. Kleptocracy was commonplace, but when The Namibian pointed out some of these iniquities in May 2001, he ordered a total ban on the purchase of the newspaper.
Nujoma made little progress in satisfying former soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia, who continued to demand jobs, land, and other benefits that they had been promised. Namibia’s involvement in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s civil war disquieted observers.
He finally relinquished power in 2005, effectively anointing his successor Hifikepunye Pohamba. His record in power for 15 years was considerably less heroic than as the leader of freedom struggle, but nonetheless his place in many people’s affections as “father of the nation” was secure, as attested by the fact that on Friday Namibia’s fifth democratically elected president, Ndemupelila Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, will take office.
Sam Nujoma, Namibian president, was born on May 12, 1929. He died on February 8, 2025, aged 95
