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Sam Nujoma, who fought against apartheid and for Namibian independence and was known officially as the country’s “founding father”, has died in Windhoek aged 95.
His death brings to an end the life of one of the last remaining liberation heroes in southern Africa after the death of others including South Africa’s Nelson Mandela and Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe.
Nujoma served as president of his country for 15 years after independence in 1990, changing the constitution so that he could run for a third term.
Although he has been praised for helping to ensure national reconciliation with his motto “One Namibia, One Nation”, he also helped establish a pattern, prevalent in much of southern Africa, in which the liberation parties have clung to power for decades after independence.
Nujoma’s South West Africa People’s Organisation (Swapo) has ruled continuously since independence and won last year’s election with 58 per cent of the vote. It has since dropped most of its Marxist ideology and has courted foreign investment, particularly in energy.
Namibia’s President Nangolo Mbumba said Nujoma, who spent nearly 30 years in exile before Namibia won independence from South Africa in 1990, “inspired us to rise to our feet and to become masters of this vast land of our ancestors”.
South Africa had taken over Namibia, which it called South-West Africa, from Germany during the first world war.
Cyril Ramaphosa, South Africa’s president, described Nujoma as an “extraordinary freedom fighter” who played a leading role in not only his country’s fight against colonialism, but also in the campaign that led to ending white-minority rule in South Africa.
“South Africa is united in grief with Namibians who have lost the leader of the Namibian revolution, who is inseparable from our own history of struggle and liberation,” he said.
Nujoma was born in 1929 in Ovamboland in the north of the country, the first of 11 children. His parents were farmers and Nujoma spent his early years tending sheep and goats before heading to the coastal city of Walvis Bay, where he worked at a whaling station.
Later, in the capital Windhoek where he worked as a cleaner on the railway, he began to organise through trade unions against apartheid labour laws. In 1959, in Cape Town, he co-founded the Ovamboland People’s Organization, a forerunner of Swapo.
He was arrested in 1959 and fled into exile. For the next three decades, he travelled the world, campaigning for an end to racist laws and for independence from South Africa. He procured weapons for Swapo’s armed wing which fought its first battle against South African troops in 1966.
In the 1970s, Swapo won recognition from the UN as the legitimate representative of Namibia’s people, but its struggle for independence became entangled in the cold war.
South Africa insisted it needed to keep Namibia as a buffer against Angola, whose MPLA liberation movement was financed by the Soviets and supported by 50,000 Cuban troops. In the end, Namibia’s independence was negotiated by the US in return for the withdrawal of Cuban troops.
Nujoma returned from exile in 1989. In his 2001 memoir, Where Others Wavered, he wrote that “he knelt and kissed the soil” of his beloved country. He won the election with 57.3 per cent of the vote, a tally that increased to 76.3 and 76.9 respectively in two further victories as Swapo tightened its grip.
In office he was praised for promoting women’s and children’s rights, but he was virulently anti-homosexual, describing homosexuality as a “foreign and corrupt ideology”.
Namibia, with 2.6mn people, remains one of the most unequal countries in the world.
The country’s presidency said it would declare a period of national mourning. “The foundations of the Republic of Namibia have been shaken,” it said.
