The first president of Namibia, Sam Nujoma, who has died aged 95, was one of the original liberation leaders who fought against the colonial project of southern Africa and, in particular, the racist apartheid regime of South Africa that had ruled his country since the end of the first world war.
Nujoma may not have been as great as Nelson Mandela in any moral sense, nor as Robert Mugabe in terms of the militarised conduct of liberation. However, he had none of the advantages of those two, whose countries both had a literate and educated population, and an – even if discriminatory – infrastructure that could be adapted for liberation.
In a vast, sparsely populated country such as Namibia, then called South West Africa, there were no centres of mobilisation and little terrain (much of it is desert) for the conduct of a guerrilla war. This made for limited possibilities of resistance and defiance.
Mugabe and Mandela were also university educated, whereas Nujoma had had only primary schooling. But this made him as one with a people similarly disadvantaged, and reflected the lack of opportunities in the territory, where only white children were allowed a secondary education.
Education became a wellspring for a future after liberation, and that was very much in the hands of the UN Institute for Namibia – a university in exile in Lusaka, Zambia, where the South West Africa People’s Organisation (Swapo) had its overall exile headquarters. Namibia’s third president, the US-educated Hage Geingob, was rector of the institute from 1975 until independence.
But it was Nujoma, born to peasant parents, Daniel and Helvi, in the northern Ovamboland village of Ongandjera, who would become the nation’s unlikely “founding father”.
After primary school, he herded cattle before moving to the capital, Windhoek, where he found work as a caretaker for South African Railways, while taking further education correspondence courses. There he became politically active, organising black workers to fight for the higher positions only open to whites, and was soon sacked for his efforts. In 1959 he co-founded the Ovamboland People’s Organisation, renamed Swapo in 1960, to represent all Namibians.
Nujoma had been exiled the year before, for organising a protest against the creation of a black township, in which 12 people were killed when police fired on them. He set up bases in Tanzania and Lusaka, but made little progress until Portuguese rule collapsed in Angola in the mid-1970s, and Swapo were able to establish bases in their southern neighbour, now backed by Soviet and Cuban forces.
Despite the fact it won no decisive military victories, Swapo was sufficient a thorn in South Africa’s side for its soldiers to attack it in Angola, crossing Zambian territory to outflank the Namibians.
It was also in Angola that Swapo located its detention camps for dissidents – in the same way as South Africa’s ANC did – where many were tortured and some also died. Liberation was not always a pleasant or ethically fair business.
However, as well as Soviet backing for Swapo, western support was growing. Both the international court of justice and the UN had called for South Africa’s withdrawal from Namibia, and described Nujoma’s party as the “sole and authentic representative” of its people.
Under international pressure, South Africa began indirect talks with Nujoma, eventually conceding in 1978 to a ceasefire deal leading to its withdrawal. However, Nujoma disputed the territory being offered, and when South Africa bombed a Swapo camp, killing hundreds of women and children, he broke off negotiations.
Fighting continued on and off over the next decade. In the end, independence was won not by military victory, but as a negotiated addendum to the US-brokered peace in the region after the Cubans defeated the South African military in southern Angola in 1989.
The last “defence forward” by the apartheid regime, and its attempt to establish a buffer state in the south of Angola, came to an embarrassing end with the intervention of the Cubans and Soviet-piloted aerial support. The rightwing Nationalist cabinet in South Africa fell, and a “moderate”, FW de Klerk, came to power, leading to the release of Mandela. The US secured the departure of the Cubans, and South Africa had to agree to the independence of Namibia.
In fact, Nujoma almost wrecked the deal, instructing his soldiers to cross into Namibia from their bases in Angola before the UN-supervised agreed date. The South African military response was only rolled back by the refusal of UN peacekeepers to give way and by emergency decisions taken by the UN representative, Martti Ahtisaari, decisions that to this day remain controversial as many felt it ceded too much ground to South Africa.
Nevertheless, when Nujoma finally returned from exile in September 1989, his speech was conciliatory, saying, “[Swapo] respects the human and democratic rights of all the citizens of Namibia. I would like to call on our white compatriots not to sit on the fence, but to participate actively in the independence process.”
Following an election where Swapo won a two-thirds majority, Nujoma was sworn in as Namibia’s first president on 21 March 1990.
He won again in 1994, then had the constitution amended so he could run for a third term, and was in power for 15 years. During that time he oversaw slow economic growth, instituted a largely successful programme of national reconciliation, and nationalised 12% of the agricultural land for redistribution. But the agricultural base in a country with limited arable soil was never going to be able to sustain a national economy. That had to come with the gradual discovery and exploitation of minerals.
He supported women’s rights, introducing programmes to make absentee fathers pay child support, and was against the enforced destitution of widows after the deaths of their husbands. However, he was no progressive. He was virulently opposed to homosexuality, and did not act against the onset of HIV/Aids, declaring it as part of a western plot to denigrate Africans.
While he was not the most spectacular liberation leader (despite his posturing in uniform, he never saw combat) nor the most highly educated, he was perhaps the only president the country could have had, given South African neglect after a disastrous and at times genocidal German colonialism. Respected by his people, and instantly recognisable with his trademark beard, Nujoma was successful enough and conciliatory enough to garner many international recognitions and awards.
In 2001 he published a memoir, Where Others Wavered. He retired as president of Swapo in 2007.
He married Kovambo (nee Mushimba) in 1956. She and his children survive him.
• Samuel Daniel Nujoma, political leader, born 12 May 1929; died 8 February 2025
