Sam Nujoma, Namibia’s first democratically elected president and “founding father,” has died aged 95.
President Nangolo Mbumba announced the death of “our revered freedom fighter and revolutionary leader” via national radio and on Facebook on Sunday.
Mbumba said the former president had died late on Saturday after being in hospital for the past three weeks.
Nujoma was the leader of the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO), a liberation movement which became the first ruling party after Namibia won independence from South Africa in 1990. He was re-elected for two more terms of office in 1994 and 1999 respectively.
South African occupation
South Africa took control of the country as part of the World War I conquest of German colonies. Namibia became a German colony in 1884 and was known as German South West Africa.
In 1966, the United Nations General Assembly placed Namibia under UN administration. However, the South African occupiers did not budge.
For decades, Nujoma fought for his ideal of a free country in which all people have equal rights and opportunities. His rebellion against the “yoke of colonial oppression” forced him into exile for almost 30 years.
From abroad, he organized the political and military resistance against the occupying forces of the racist South African apartheid regime.
It was only in 1989, when the South African apartheid regime was already crumbling, that Pretoria withdrew. In September, Nujoma returned to Namibia.
At a party conference in 2017 of the ruling SWAPO, of which he was co-founder, Nujoma said Namibians were denied “the simplest and most fundamental human rights of self-determination and independence” during the occupation.
Nujoma’s path different from Mandela’s
But Nujoma was not an uncontroversial freedom fighter.
Unlike South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, he did not spend almost three decades in prison, and he was also responsible for the dark side of the sometimes brutal liberation struggle while in exile.
The SWAPO leadership is said to have persecuted, tortured or imprisoned internal critics.
Hundreds of children are said to have been abducted to training camps in neighbouring Angola and used as child soldiers.
But he steers country toward successful democracy
Once in power, the issue of expropriation repeatedly caused conflict, as most of the land was in the hands of white farmers.
All the land in Namibia belongs to the Namibian people, which is why the government is allowed to expropriate, Nujoma explained in an interview with the newspaper “Die Welt” in 2002.
Despite the sabre-rattling, however, the land reform mostly progressed slowly, with Nujoma keeping critics who wanted to quickly expropriate all whites in check.
Namibia developed into one of Africa’s most stable democracies.
Meanwhile, Namibia’s friendly relations with North Korea and Cuba irritated some Western donor countries. Relations with the former colonial power Germany were also good, with Nujoma calling the Germans “distant cousins.”
Germany became an important donor to development projects.
Samuel Shafishuna Nujoma was born on May 12, 1929, the eldest of 11 children of a farming family of the Ovambo people in the north of the country.
He helped with farming and household chores growing up and later continued his education with evening classes and became active in the trade union movement before being elected chairman of a forerunner organization of SWAPO in 1959.
He is survived by his wife Kovambo and two sons.
