Statement

The ANC Veterans League sends condolences to the family and people of Namibia for having lost the father of their nation, Sam Nujoma. Your loss is our loss, as we fought side by side against colonial oppression and apartheid for many decades.

Sam Nujoma was one of the giants of the African liberation movement. He joins the ranks of African leaders such as Tata Nelson Mandela, Jomo Kenyatta, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Samora Machel, Amilcar Cabral and Patrice Lumumba, who led the struggle for Africans to free themselves from colonialism in the twentieth century.

Before the age of 30, Sam Nujoma led the Ovamboland People’s Organisation, the forerunner to the South Western African People’s Organisation (SWAPO). He led SWAPO, first as a liberation movement and later as the ruling party of Namibia for 47 years. After Namibia became independent in 1989, he was President for three terms.

The paths of ANC and SWAPO were intertwined. We both moved from strategies of peaceful protest to adopting the armed struggle in the face of the intransigent South African regime who fought a ‘border war’ in northern Namibia. This war has left indelible scars not only on the people of Namibia but on the lives and families of former white soldiers and ANC uMkhonto we Sizwe combatants who were drawn into the conflict.

ANC and SWAPO fought together with the Angolan liberation movements and the Cubans to defeat the South African apartheid regime at the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale. This largest conventional battle on the African continent since World War II, between August 1987 and March 1988, marked a turning point in Southern Africa’s liberation, leading to Namibia’s independence in 1989 and democracy in South Africa in 1994.

Through Sam Nujoma’s leadership, Namibians built a constitutional democracy and respect for the rule of law. However, in Namibia, as in South Africa, the legacy of colonial dispossession lives on, especially in respect of land redistribution.

Ironically, when South Africa seeks to use legal means, such as the recently promulgated Expropriation Act, to address colonial legacies, we are attacked by governments such as the United States, which instead uses Executive Orders that would not pass constitutional scrutiny in our country.Further, while the colonial powers created nation-states in Africa that made no ethnic or geographical sense, let us remember the call of Ghanaian liberation leader Kwame Nkrumah, who called for African unity rather than further Balkanisation and trying to change these borders by force of arms. In the face of the current conflict in Eastern and Central Africa and a fragile and fluid international situation, African unity is more important than ever before.

To honour Sam Nujoma’s memory and that of the first generation of liberation leaders, we must recommit ourselves to redressing colonialism’s inequities and working for African unity.

May his soul rest in peace.

Issued by ANC Veterans League.

Snuki Zikalala: ANCVL President
Tel: 082 561 3900

Dr Snuki Zikalala, ANC VL President