Former Namibian President who once travelled using Tanzanian passports has passed away aged 95.
The freedom fighter, anti-apartheid and founding father of the Namibian Nation Sam Nujoma once lived in Dar-es-salaam and even travelled using Tanzanian passports during his struggle to free his country.
Sam Nujoma who was also going under the alias of Samwel Mwakangale, acting as a teacher from Dodoma in Tanzania, was an activist and guerrilla leader who became Namibia’s first democratically elected president.
Sam Nujoma was one of several Southern African freedom fighters who travelled the world using Tanzania passports, others were Nelson Mandela and singer Miriam Makeba.
He led the country after Namibia won its independence from the apartheid South Africa.
The BBC called him a giant who shaped Namibia’s national identity who leaves a void few can hope to fill.
Formerly known as South West Africa, Namibia endured many years of colonial violence in the hands of Europeans who had taken over the country around the turn of the 20th Century.
Namibia was under German occupation from 1884 until 1915, when Germany lost its colony in World War One. But from 1904, the colonizers reportedly killed tens of thousands of Namibians in what has been dubbed the world’s ‘forgotten genocide.’
After the Germans left, Namibia fell under the Apartheid South Africa, which extended its racist laws to the country, denying black Namibians any political rights, as well as restricting social and economic freedoms.
Exhausted by the regime Namibia broke into a guerrilla war of independence in 1966, with Nujoma hailing from Etunda village, being actively involved in the fight against white-minority rule.
Married to Kovambo Theopoldine Katjimune with whom he had four children, and working on a railway, he held a deep passion for politics and yearned to see his people free from the injustice and indignity of colonialism.
By 1959, Nujoma had become the head of the Owamboland Peoples organization, the independence movement that was a forerunner to Swapo.
A year later, aged 30, Nujoma was forced into exile. With no passport, he crisscrossed his way adopting different guises hitchhiking on trains and sometimes jumping onto planes to first Zambia and eventually Tanzania.
In Dar-es-salaam he acquired a Tanzanian passport and started using the local identity of General Samuel Mwakangale before heading to West Africa.
With the help of Liberian authorities who were early backers of black Namibians’ push for independence, Nujoma flew to New York and petitioned the United Nations Organization (UNO) to help grant Namibia its independence.
However, South African leaders refused.
Nujoma was branded a “Marxist terrorist” by South Africa’s white leaders for leading forces that fought alongside the anti-apartheid movement, posing a formidable challenge to the oppressive regimes in several southern African countries.
With support from Cuban troops who were fighting in neighboring Angola, Swapo guerrillas were able to attack South African bases in Namibia.
Returning from exile, Nujoma was swiftly rearrested by the South African authorities and deported to Zambia six years later.
“We knew that only military force and mass political mobilization backed by the support of the people would force South Africa out of Namibia,” Nujoma narrated in his autobiography “Where Others Wavered, which was published in 2001.
He led Swapo forces from exile, before returning to the country in 1989, a year after South Africa had agreed to Namibian independence.
South Africa was becoming more isolated internationally and the cost of military intervention was increasing. Namibia finally gained independence in 1990 after almost 25 years of warfare.
In Namibia’s first democratic elections in 1990, Swapo won a huge majority and Nujoma became the country’s first president.