Editorial | Remembering Sam Nujoma

It is perhaps a sign of the times that Sam Nujoma died, and was buried last week, with nary a whimper in Jamaica.

Mr Nujoma, 95, died on February 8. His funeral was on March 1.

A former president of Namibia, Sam Nujoma was the last of the towering figures of Africa’s anti-colonial movement, especially in the fight against white minority rule in the continent’s southern region, in whose defeat Jamaica’s voice carried great moral force.

Indeed, as the first president of independent Namibia, Mr Nujoma visited Jamaica in 1995. He was awarded the island’s fourth-highest honour, the Order of Jamaica, by the then prime minister, P.J. Patterson. Jamaica’s current prime minister, Andrew Holness, made a return visit more than six years ago and signed agreements with the then president, Hage Geingob.

Alongside iconic figures such as South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, and Mozambique’s Samora Machel, Mr Nujoma’s was among the readily recognisable faces of the liberation and anti-apartheid movements in the 1970s and 1980s. He was the leader of the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO).

At the time, South West Africa was officially a protectorate of South Africa, ceded to that country by the League of Nations after the defeat of Germany, the former colonial power, in the First World War. Effectively, South West Africa was a South African colony, run along the lines of the latter’s system of apartheid, a formalisation of white political and economic dominance.

COMMON INSULATION

As one of its founders, and president of SWAPO from its inception in 1960 – the same year that the UN Security Council rescinded South Africa’s mandate over the territory – Mr Nujoma, from his bases in exile, travelled the world drumming up support for his country’s independence. With no domestic political space within which to operate, he, in the mid-1960s, also orchestrated a guerilla war against the South African colonists.

However, it was not until 1978, a dozen years after the start of the bush war, that the Security Council passed Resolution 435, calling for a ceasefire and supervised election in South West Africa. It was another 11 years, in November 1989, with the collapse of apartheid increasingly, and very obviously, imminent that the South Africans finally limped out of what was to become Namibia, whose independence was formalised four months later. South Africa would have its first democratic election four years later, bringing Mr Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) to power.

A decade and a half earlier, the Portuguese, faced with a sapping guerilla war in the colony and political instability at home, had been forced to withdraw from Angola. And in 1980, Ian Smith’s white minority-ruled Rhodesia had to give way to independent Zimbabwe.Jamaica’s contribution to these monumental changes cannot be underestimated. Many of Africa’s early pre-independence leaders were influenced by Marcus Garvey’s ideas of Pan-Africanism. But more critically, Jamaica was a major voice on the global stage against apartheid, starting with the island’s 1950s banning of South Africa’s products, and amplified by Michael Manley’s vigorous advocacy in the 1970s, and beyond.

Post-colonial Sam Nujoma never gained the sagely iconic stature of a Mandela, or, perhaps the revolutionary appeal of a Machel. Nonetheless, he was Mandela-esque in some of his approaches to governance in Namibia during his 15 years as the country’s president.

Although he was accused of authoritarian tendencies, he developed a multi-party democracy. Despite the government’s efforts at rebalancing, white Namibians, who still control the bulk of the land and the economic power, have not faced reprisals. Moreover, Mr Nujoma gave up power voluntarily.

In these times of fraught global relations, these histories deserve remembering. For to forget is not only to open the door to the possibility of history repeating itself, but to lose the tools with which to resist the worst of its effects.

To Jamaica and other countries in the Caribbean, Namibia and Africa are largely kith and kin and part of the Global South, with which this region can find common insulation.