Namibia's Long Wait — SWAPO, Robben Island, and the Last African Independence
Namibia's independence in March 1990 was the last act of African decolonisation and the most protracted — a struggle that stretched from the founding of the South West Africa People's Organisation in 1960 to the independence ceremony thirty years later at which Sam Nujoma, who had spent those three decades in exile organising, lobbying, and commanding a guerrilla army across four countries, was sworn in as the first president of a country that had never previously existed in its current form. The territory that became Namibia had been a German colony — German South West Africa — until the First World War, when South Africa occupied it under a League of Nations mandate. South Africa then refused to relinquish the territory after the Second World War, incorporating it as an effective fifth province and extending apartheid's racial laws to its people. The United Nations revoked the mandate in 1966. South Africa ignored the revocation. Namibia's independence had to be won by force of arms, international law, and three decades of sustained political pressure before South Africa finally agreed to withdraw.
Andimba Toivo ya Toivo is the figure who stands at the founding of Namibian organised resistance. An Ovambo worker who had been radicalised by the conditions of contract labour — the system that tied Namibian workers to white farms and mines under conditions that amounted to indentured servitude — Toivo ya Toivo co-founded the Ovamboland People's Organisation in 1958, which became SWAPO in 1960. Arrested in 1966 after SWAPO launched its first armed operations, he was tried for terrorism in Pretoria in 1968. His statement to the court — delivered calmly, without defiance for its own sake, explaining precisely why Namibians had chosen to resist and what they required — became one of the most important political texts of the southern African liberation era. "I am a Namibian," he told the judge, "and I will be treated as one." He was sentenced to twenty years' imprisonment and sent to Robben Island, where he spent fifteen years alongside Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu. He was released in 1984, returned to Namibia as a hero, and lived to see independence and to serve as a minister in the government he had helped create.
SWAPO fought its liberation struggle simultaneously in the field and in the international arena, and Theo-Ben Gurirab was the architect of its diplomatic strategy. As SWAPO's permanent representative to the United Nations from 1964 to 1986 — twenty-two years in New York arguing Namibia's case before the General Assembly, the Security Council, and the International Court of Justice — he built the legal and political framework that gave SWAPO its status as the sole legitimate representative of the Namibian people, isolated South Africa internationally, and eventually forced the negotiations that led to UN Security Council Resolution 435 of 1978, the framework for Namibian independence that South Africa ignored for another twelve years before finally honouring it. The 1971 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice — which declared South Africa's presence in Namibia illegal — was substantially the result of SWAPO's legal arguments before the court, and those arguments were substantially Gurirab's work.
The military dimension of SWAPO's struggle was carried by the People's Liberation Army of Namibia, whose fighters operated from bases in Angola and Zambia and infiltrated across the Namibian border in small units. Peter Nanyemba commanded PLAN through much of the 1970s and was the military architect of a campaign that forced South Africa to commit enormous resources to the defence of Namibia and the pursuit of SWAPO bases deep into Angola — resources that strained the apartheid military budget and contributed to the internal pressures that eventually forced the South African government to negotiate. Nanyemba was killed in 1983 when South African forces attacked a SWAPO base in Angola. The war continued until the Tripartite Agreement of 1988, under which South Africa agreed to implement Resolution 435 in exchange for the withdrawal of Cuban forces from Angola. Independence followed on 21 March 1990. Namibia became the last country on the African continent to achieve freedom from colonial or minority rule — and the only one whose independence had been substantially won through a combination of armed struggle and international law working together over three decades.
