Sam Nujoma, anti-apartheid activist and Namibia's first president, dies at 95
Sam Nujoma, the first president of independent Namibia who led the country to freedom from apartheid South Africa in 1990, has died, Namibia's current leader announced Sunday. He was 95. Known as the father of his nation, Nujoma served for 15 years as Namibia's founding president, from 1990 until 2005.
Namibian President Nangolo Mbumba said Nujoma died from an illness Saturday night after being hospitalized in the capital, Windhoek. He did not share specific details about Nujoma's health condition.
"The foundations of the Republic of Namibia have been shaken," Mbumba said in a statement. "Over the past three weeks, the Founding President of the Republic of Namibia and Founding Father of the Namibian Nation was hospitalized for medical treatment and medical observation due to ill health."
"Unfortunately, this time, the most gallant son of our land could not recover from his illness," Mbumba added. He said Nujoma "provided maximum leadership to our nation and spared no effort to motivate each and every Namibian to build a country that would stand tall and proud among the nations of the world" and praised him for marshaling the Namibian people through "the darkest hours of our liberation struggle."
A fiery anti-apartheid activist, Nujoma helped launch Namibia' liberation movement, called the South West Peoples' Organization, or SWAPO, in the 1960s, and went on to lead the country's lengthy battle for independence from South Africa.
Nujoma was the last of a generation of African leaders who brought their countries out of colonial or white minority rule that included South Africa's Nelson Mandela, Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, Zambia's Kenneth Kaunda, Tanzania's Julius Nyerere and Mozambique's Samora Machel.
He was revered in his arid, sparsely populated homeland in southwest Africa as a charismatic father figure who steered it to democracy and stability after long colonial rule by Germany and a bitter war of independence from South Africa.
He spent nearly 30 years in exile as the leader of Namibia's independence movement before returning for Parliamentary elections in late 1989, the first democratic vote in the country. He was elected president by lawmakers months later in 1990 as Namibia's independence was confirmed.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said Nujoma led Namibia's independence movement "against the seemingly unshakeable might of colonial and apartheid authorities and forces" and spurred the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa on its own final steps to freedom.
"Sam Nujoma inspired the Namibian people to pride and resistance that belied the size of the population," Ramaphosa said. "Namibia's attainment of independence from South Africa in 1990 ignited in us the inevitability of our own liberation."
Many Namibians also credited Nujoma's leadership for the process of national reconciliation after the deep divisions caused by the independence war and South Africa's policies of dividing the country into ethnically based regional governments, with separate education and health care for each race.
Even political opponents praised Nujoma — who was branded a Marxist and accused of ruthless suppression of dissent while in exile — for establishing a democratic Constitution and involving white businessmen and politicians in government after independence.
Despite his pragmatism and nation-building at home, Nujoma often hit foreign headlines for his fierce anti-Western rhetoric. At a United Nations conference in Geneva in 2000, Nujoma stunned delegates when he claimed AIDS was a man-made biological weapon. He also occasionally waged a verbal war on homosexuality, calling gays "idiots" and branding homosexuality a "foreign and corrupt ideology."
He once banned all foreign television programs, declaring they had corrupted the youth of Namibia.
Nujoma built ties with North Korea, Cuba, Russia and China, some of which had supported Namibia's liberation movement by providing arms and training.
But he balanced that with outreach to the West, and Nujoma was the first African leader to be hosted at the White House by former U.S. President Bill Clinton in 1993. Clinton called Nujoma "the George Washington of his country" and "a genuine hero of the world's movement toward democracy."
Nujoma also advocated for the advancement of women in a largely patriarchal region, saying "there is no shortage of competent and experienced African women to lead the way forward." Namibia elected its first female president last year and President-elect Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah's term is due to start next month.
Nujoma grew up in a rural, impoverished family, the eldest of 11 children. His early life revolved around looking after cattle and the cultivation of land. He attended a mission school and worked in a general store and then a whaling station on the coast, before a job in Windhoek as a cleaner for South African Railways.
He was arrested following a political protest in 1959 and fled the territory shortly after his release to go into exile in Tanzania. There, he helped establish the South West African People's Organization and was named its president in 1960. SWAPO has been Namibia's ruling party since 1990, and Nujoma ultimately led it for 47 years until stepping down in 2007.
When South Africa refused to heed a 1966 U.N. resolution ending the mandate it had been given over the German colony of South West Africa after World War I, Nujoma launched SWAPO's guerrilla campaign.
"We started the armed struggle with only two sub-machine guns and two pistols," Nujoma once said. "I got them from Algeria, plus some rounds of ammunition."
SWAPO never achieved military victory in an independence war that lasted more than 20 years, but Nujoma won wide political support during his exile, leading to the U.N. declaring SWAPO the sole representative of the Namibian people and South Africa ultimately withdrawing from the country.
As he mixed with world leaders, Nujoma was aware of his humble roots and lack of education. After leaving school early to work, he later attended night school, largely to improve his English. He said he dedicated his life to his country's liberation.
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National Geographic
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The Best Democracy Is Anarchy (opinion)
The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World…, by David Graeber, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 384 pages, $32 Long before European governments or their colonies began to embrace "democracy," something far more democratic was widely practiced in the world's vast ungovernable spaces. Black Sam Bellamy's 1717 pirate crew was "a collection of people in which there was likely to be at least some firsthand knowledge of a very wide range of directly democratic institutions," wrote David Graeber, the late anarchist and anthropologist, in one of his essays collected posthumously in The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World…. Those institutions ranged "from Swedish things to African village assemblies to Native American councils": a rich assortment of influences as the sailors found themselves "forced to improvise some mode of self-government in the complete absence of any state." The very ungovernability of the Atlantic itself, the vast inland frontiers, the dense forests and swamplands, made it "the perfect intercultural space" of experiment and improvisation. For Graeber, it was the occupants of those democratic spaces, and not any politician or political theorist, from whom we should be taking our historical cues. Democracy, he argued, is not representative government, where the people select appointees to make decisions for them. That's Roman nonsense. Democracy is a daily exercise. It is (or can be) practiced in your workplace or family or place of learning, because those units are the most basic and consequential to daily life. It lives in cultural practice and not in states, and states cannot be democratized. Graeber therefore sided with the libertarian anarchists who believe humanity's best future has nothing to do with the state. "Anarchism and democracy," he wrote, "are—or should be—largely identical." *** Many historians accept the thesis that there is no real through line between Athenian democracy and modern Western states. Building on that, Graeber argued that "the West" is more appropriately called the "'North Atlantic system,' which replaced the Mediterranean semi-periphery, and emerged as a world economy of its own, rivaling, and then gradually, slowly, painfully incorporating the older world economy that had centered on the cosmopolitan societies of the Indian Ocean." This system "was created through almost unimaginable catastrophe"—the rise of trans-Atlantic African slavery, the almost total destruction of Native America, the deaths of "at least a hundred million human beings," and the infusion of racism into science. But it "also produced its own forms of cosmopolitanism, with endless fusions of African, Native American, and European traditions," as in Black Sam Bellamy's crew. Amid those encounters, "a history of mutinies, pirates, rebellions, defections, experimental communities, and every sort of antinomian and populist idea…seems to have played a key role in many of the radical ideas that came to be referred to as 'democracy.'" Democracy, therefore, was not an invention. It was, and is, an emergent order arising "in a face-to-face community, to figure out what most members of that community want to do." It is not structure, control, or even force; it is a social process of building consensus within a specific and identifiable community. "Consensus decision-making is typical of societies where there would be no way to compel a minority to agree with a majority decision," wrote Graeber, "either because there is no state with a monopoly of coercive force, or because the state has no interest in or does not tend to intervene in local decision-making." The U.S. government has never resembled this. Our Framers consistently praised the Roman Republic and trashed Athenian democracy. "At the time, outright democrats…like Tom Paine, for instance—were considered a tiny minority of rabble-rousers even within revolutionary regimes." With time, the word democracy became more acceptable. But in practice, "politicians simply began substituting the word democracy for republic, without any change in meaning." Real change requires something more. New cultures can form through processes of "conscious refusal" to cooperate with regimes. Graeber gave the example of the Merina in Madagascar. Modern Merina culture emerged in reaction to the historical monarchy, which to Graeber represented a "heroic society," with the hero-monarch at its head. Modern Merina culture, by contrast, is an "anti-heroic society," where "the only ancient kings who were remembered fondly were those said to have voluntarily abandoned their power." During his fieldwork in Madagascar, Graeber felt "the presence of an ideology that seemed to take every principle of heroic society and explicitly reject it." These modern oral historians thought of ancient kings as egotistical fools engaged in wasteful and corrosive "theatricality, boasting, and self-aggrandizing lying," resulting in undue restrictions on the people—and the Merina had no use for them. *** That brings us to another topic raised in the book: puppets, and why cops seem so scared of them. Giant puppets played a major role in the Occupy movement of 2011 and in the earlier globalization protests of the late 1990s and early 2000s, turning up to disrupt public proceedings and spaces. As Graeber recalled, one group of protesters "might have the Giant Pig that represents the World Bank," another "a Giant Liberation Puppet whose arms can block an entire highway." Police from Miami to Seattle hunted down puppets like a reverse Chucky film, slaughtering them in imaginative ways. One was held outside the "squad car with the head sticking out and driving so as to smash it against every sign and street post available." Why? On the most direct level, many cops were convinced that these woke-commie-nonsense papier-mâché public-art pieces were in fact mortal dangers, filled with urine bombs, wrist rockets, bricks, crowbars, acid squirt guns, and other scary fantasies. But Graeber believed something symbolic was afoot as well: that those puppets and those agents of the state were in some sense fundamentally opposed. Puppets, he suggested, are the opposite of monuments—they are "extraordinarily creative" but also "intentionally ephemeral." They are mobile, larger-than-life symbols of the "endless alternative frameworks" that exist outside of the state. They embody the new cultures that we, like the Merina, could create. They are antiheroic. They are anarchistic. The "ultimate hidden truth" of this book's title is that history is not a set of cosmological handcuffs. The world belongs to us, the living, to make out of it what we will. The post The Best Democracy Is Anarchy appeared first on
