He belongs in the list of big names of the liberation fighters of southern Africa, but Sam Nujoma always remained faithful to his simple origin. “Nujoma was a humble person and with his retirement after his presidency of Namibia he lived in a simple home,” says the South African apartheid activist David de Beer, who knew him personally. According to the bear, his struggle had not made him vengefully. “After independence in 1990, he was not bitter against De Witten who had established the brutal apartheid system in Namibia. He worked on reconciliation, De Witten trusted him and he has saved peace. ” Sam Nujoma died on Saturday at the age of 95 in the Namibian capital Windhoek.
Struggle
Nujoma was born in 1929 in Northern Namibia, which was then driven as Southwest Africa by Apartheid South Africa. In the countryside he grew up in a poor family, as the oldest of eleven children. He went to a mission school before moving to Windhoek, where he found work at the railways. He became involved in political agitation, was arrested after a political protest in 1959 and fled the country shortly after his release and went into exile in Tanzania. That country became the fallback place under President Julius Nyerere for many liberation movements from South Africa and Rhodesia. Nujoma founded the South West African People’s Organization: Swapo. Swapo was the government party under the leadership of Nujoma in Namibian independence in 1990.
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During the struggle for independence, Swapo struggled with internal disagreements. In Kampen in southern Angola, from which Swapo carried out attacks on the South African army, countless critics on his leadership were imprisoned and tortured under Nujoma’s leadership. Whether or not this should be given to this led to schisms in the anti-apartheid movement in the Netherlands. “He inspired us to resist and become masters of this vast land of our ancestors,” praised the current Namibian President Mbumba Nangola Nujoma after his death. Although it was not so much Nujoma’s armed struggle, as the changing geopolitical situation that Namibia eventually brought independence in 1990.
Few controversies
Nujoma exchanged his camouflage clothing for a business suit that year. He had since taken English tutoring, and although he sometimes made controversial decisions, such as the ban on English television programs to stop Western imperialist influence, he led his country without many controversies. For example, he never tried, as his former struggle mates in the other liberated countries of southern Africa did, to change the Constitution so that he could stay in power for longer as president. Nujoma resigned in 2007. But just like in those countries, the credit of the generation of liberation fighters is also running out in Namibia and swapo draws less votes in every election, especially among young people.
De Beer met Nujoma in 1974 in exile in London in his work for Namibian refugees, long before his presidency. “Many years later, once in the presidential palace in Windhoek, I was able to walk into him without an appointment and bureaucratic hassle, he sent his advisers away to be able to talk to an old comrade.” Leaders like Mugabe in Zimbabwe had already emerged as unreachable single rulers, turned away from old combatants and nestled on a high throne on the plush. “Nujoma remained herself, a man with his feet on the floor.”