Sam Nujoma
Samuel Shafiishuna Daniel Nujoma was a Namibian revolutionary, anti-apartheid activist and politician who served three terms as the first president of Namibia, from 1990 to 2005. Nujoma was a founding member and the first president of the South West Africa People's Organisation in 1960.
Nujoma became involved in anti-colonial politics during the 1950s. In 1959, he co-founded and served as the first president of the Ovamboland People's Organization, a nationalist organization advocating for an independent Namibia. In December 1958, he was an organizer of the Old Location resistance and was arrested and deported to Ovamboland. In 1960, he escaped and went into exile in Tanzania, where he was welcomed by Julius Nyerere.
Nujoma played an important role as the leader of the national liberation movement in campaigning for Namibia's political independence from South African rule. The OPO was renamed SWAPO in 1960. Nujoma established the People's Liberation Army of Namibia in 1962 and launched a guerrilla war against the apartheid government of South Africa in August 1966 at Omugulugwombashe after the United Nations withdrew the mandate for South Africa to govern the territory. Nujoma led SWAPO during the lengthy Namibian War of Independence, which lasted from 1966 to 1989.
Namibia achieved independence from South Africa in 1990 and held its first democratic elections the same year. SWAPO won a majority, and Nujoma was sworn in as the country's first president on 21 March 1990. He was re-elected for two more terms in 1994 and 1999. Nujoma retired as SWAPO party president on 30 November 2007.
Nujoma published his autobiography, Where Others Wavered in 2001. He received [|multiple honours and awards] for his leadership, including the Lenin Peace Prize and the Indira Gandhi Peace Prize. The Parliament of Namibia conferred on him the titles "Founding President of the Republic of Namibia" and "Father of the Namibian Nation". In 2007, SWAPO named him "Leader of the Namibian Revolution".
Early life
Samuel Shafiishuna Daniel Nujoma was born at Etunda, a village in Ongandjera, near Okahao, Ovamboland, South West Africa, on 12 May 1929. Nujoma was born to Helvi Mpingana Kondombolo and Daniel Uutoni Nujoma. His mother, Helvi, was a Uukwambi princess by descent, and this fact would later reinforce Nujoma's charismatic influence during his political career. He was the eldest of his parents' eleven children.Nujoma spent much of his early childhood looking after his siblings and tending to the family's cattle and traditional farming activities. His educational opportunities were limited. He started attending a Finnish missionary school at Okahao when he was ten and completed Standard Six, which was as high as possible for blacks during the time. In 1946, at age 17, he moved to Walvis Bay to live with his aunt, where he began his first employment at a general store for a monthly salary of 10 shillings. He later worked at a whaling station. While there, he was exposed to world politics by meeting soldiers from Argentina, Norway, and other parts of Europe who had come during World War II.
In 1949, Nujoma moved to Windhoek, where he started work as a cleaner for South African Railways while attending adult night school at St Barnabas Anglican Church School in the Windhoek Old Location, mainly to improve his English. He further studied for his Junior Certificate through correspondence at the Trans‐Africa Correspondence College in South Africa.
Political career
During World War I, South Africa had defeated the German colonial forces in South West Africa and established martial law in the colony after making a peace treaty in July 1915. After the war, the League of Nations officially assigned the former German colony to the United Kingdom as a mandate under the administration of South Africa. When the National Party won the 1948 election in South Africa, it passed laws establishing racial segregation known as apartheid. It applied these laws to South West Africa as well, which it governed as the de facto fifth province of South Africa.Nujoma became involved in politics in the early 1950s through trade unions. Nujoma's political outlook was shaped by his work experiences, his awareness of the contract labour system, and his increasing knowledge of the independence campaigns across Africa. As a result of this activity, he was dismissed from SAR in 1957. In 1957, a group of Namibians working in Cape Town, led by Andimba Toivo ya Toivo, formed the Ovamboland People's Congress. OPC was opposed to South African policies in South West Africa, including the inhumane contract labour system under which people were forced to work for meager wages. Nujoma had become friends with Toivo, and in 1959, he joined with OPC cofounder Jacob Kuhangua to start the Windhoek branch of the organisation, which had by then been renamed the Ovamboland People's Organization. At its first congress, Nujoma was elected president. During the next year, he travelled to Namibia in secret, mobilizing and setting up branch structures of OPO. In September 1959, the South West African National Union was formed as an umbrella body for anti-colonial resistance groups. Nujoma joined its executive committee representing OPO.
After the Old Location Massacre in December 1959, Nujoma was arrested and charged for organizing the resistance and faced threats of deportation to the north of the country. He was released after one week in custody. By the directive of OPO leadership and in collaboration with the Herero Chiefs' Council under the leadership of Chief Hosea Kutako, it was decided that Nujoma join the other Namibians in exile who were lobbying the United Nations on behalf of the anti-colonial cause for Namibia. In 1960, Nujoma petitioned the UN through letters and eventually went into exile in February of that year. He left Namibia on 29 February, crossing into Bechuanaland and from there travelling to Bulawayo in Southern Rhodesia by train. He flew from Bulawayo to Salisbury and on to Ndola in Northern Rhodesia. With the assistance of members of the Northern Rhodesian United National Independence Party he crossed into the Belgian Congo's Katanga Province. There Nujoma met Moise Tshombe from the Conakat Party of Congolese. Crossing back over the border to Ndola, he boarded a flight to Mbeya. In Mbeya, he was treated for malaria and escaped from the hospital after being threatened with arrest by the colonial authorities. From Mbeya, Nujoma travelled with the assistance of officials of the Tanganyika African National Union via Njombe, Iringa, and Dodoma to Dar-Es-Salaam. With the assistance of Julius Nyerere, then president of TANU, he received a passport. While in Tanganyika, he received permission to address the UN Committee on South West Africa in New York. In April 1960, Nujoma travelled from Tanganyika to Khartoum, Sudan, and from there to Accra, Ghana, where he attended the All-African Peoples' Conference organized by Kwame Nkrumah against the French atom bomb test in the Sahara Desert. Nujoma met with other African nationalist leaders such as Patrice Lumumba, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Joseph Kasa-Vubu, and Frantz Fanon at the conference. His early encounters with other African nationalist leaders left a lasting impression and informed his Pan-African outlook. Kwame Nkrumah assisted Nujoma to travel to the United States and later to Liberia, where a case on South West Africa was being presented to the International Court of Justice.
After breaking away from SWANU, OPO reconstituted itself as the South West Africa People's Organisation in New York on 19 April 1960, and Nujoma was elected president in absentia. He arrived in New York in June 1960 where he petitioned before the Sub-Committee of the United Nations General Assembly Fourth Committee. Nujoma demanded that South West Africa be given its independence by 1963 at the latest. He then returned to Tanganyika in 1961, from where he and a small group of activists developed SWAPO into an international force. He received support from other African nationalists and received strong backing from Julius Nyerere. Nujoma established SWAPO's provisional headquarters in Dar es Salaam and arranged scholarships and military training for Namibians who had started to join him there.
In 1962, SWAPO founded its armed wing, the South West African Liberation Army, later renamed the People's Liberation Army of Namibia. Nujoma himself procured the first weapons from Algeria via Egypt, Sudan, Tanzania, and Zambia, from where they were taken to Omugulugwombashe in Ovamboland. Nujoma continued his diplomatic rounds as SWAPO set up offices across Africa, Europe, and the Americas. He represented SWAPO at the founding of the Non-Aligned Movement on 1 September 1961 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, as well as at the founding of the Organisation of African Unity in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on 25 May 1963. In 1965, the OAU recognized SWAPO as the only lawful representative of the Namibian people. On 21 March 1966, in a bid to test South Africa's claims at the International Court of Justice at the Hague that Namibians in exile were free to return and its assertion that they were in self-imposed exile, Nujoma, accompanied by Hifikepunye Pohamba, chartered a plane to Windhoek. On arrival at the airport, they were arrested and deported to Zambia the next day. On 26 August 1966, the first armed clash between SWALA and the South African security forces took place when paratroopers and police attacked SWALA combatants who had set up a camp at Omugulugwombashe. The attack marked the beginning of the Namibian War of Independence, which would last more than 25 years.
File:Bundesarchiv Bild 183-1989-0818-034, Berlin, Günter Sieber begrüßt Sam Nujoma.jpg|thumb|left|Günter Sieber, member of the SED Central Committee and head of the International Relations Department, greets Nujoma on arrival in Berlin, in August 1989. Shikwetepo Haindongo, a representative of SWAPO in East Germany, is at the rear left.
In 1969, Nujoma was reaffirmed as SWAPO President at the Tanga Consultative Conference in Tanzania. In 1974, the Portuguese Empire collapsed, and Namibia's border with Angola became much more susceptible to guerrilla infiltration. Nujoma recognized that this paved the way for major changes in the way the war was being fought, and over the next two years, SWAPO's military campaign shifted its base from Zambia to Angola. The opening of the border enabled thousands of SWAPO supporters to stream out of Namibia to join the movement in exile. Nujoma's son, Utoni Nujoma and his two brothers were among those who arrived in Angola. At the 1977 World Conference Against Apartheid in Lisbon, Nujoma underlined the necessity to destroy the colonial system and institutions of the apartheid regime in Namibia to build those that would serve the interests of people irrespective of race, religion, or origin. He also warned of the danger of the installation of neocolonialist marionettes who would superficially change the visible colonial regime while the position of the majority of people would stay the same. Nujoma led the SWAPO negotiations team between the Western Contact Group, which consisted of West Germany, Britain, France, the US and Canada, and South Africa on the one hand, and the Frontline States and Nigeria on the other, about proposals that would eventually become United Nations Security Council Resolution 435, passed in September 1978. While the agreement on Resolution 435, which embodied the plan for free and fair elections in Namibia, was undoubtedly a diplomatic coup, its implementation became bogged down for another ten years. South African delaying tactics and the decision by U.S. president Ronald Reagan's administration to link a Cuban withdrawal from Angola to Namibian independence frustrated hopes of an immediate settlement. On 19 March 1989, the signing of the cease-fire agreement with South Africa took place, which resulted in the implementation of Security Council Resolution 435.
After 29 years in exile, Nujoma returned to Namibia in September 1989 to lead SWAPO to victory in the UN-supervised elections that paved the way for independence. Nujoma returned a day before the UN deadline for the Namibian people to register to vote for an election that would draft a constitution when it received its independence from South Africa. The Constituent Assembly, elected in November 1989, chose him as Namibia's first president. Nujoma was sworn in on 21 March 1990, in the presence of Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, Secretary-General of the UN, Frederik de Klerk, president of South Africa, and Nelson Mandela, just released from prison.