Where others wavered: Nujoma at 80

On 12 May 2009 Sam Nujoma turns 80. As the outstanding Namibian leader for half of a century, he personifies like no one else in the country’s contemporary history the patriarch heading the family. This analogy not only corresponds with the title Founding Father of the Republic of Namibia, as conferred upon him by parliament after his retirement as head of state, it also links to the distinct notion of family ascribed to by the liberation movement.

Raymond Suttner, an ANC (African National Congress) underground activist serving as a political prisoner the longest period in South African solitary confinement, deals with this in his 2008 published book The ANC Underground in South Africa. The liberation organisation represented a distinct notion of family. There was a general suppression of ‘the personal’ in favour of ‘the collective’. Individual judgment (and thereby autonomy) was substituted by a collective decision from the leadership. Such 'warrior culture, the militarist tradition' according to Suttner 'entailed not only heroic acts but also many cases of abuse and power' – not least over women.

Suttner based his study on interviews with activists both in exile and on the home front. He concludes, 'Any involvement in a revolution has an impact on conceptions of the personal. Given the overriding demands for sacrifice and loyalty to something greater than oneself, it leads invariably to a negation of intimacy.' Put differently, the intimacy of the family was replaced by the leader maximo as the alter ego.

Not surprisingly, Sam Nujoma, as the political father figure of Namibian independence (mothers are conspicuously absent), personifies in a particularly pronounced fashion such a role model. He prefers posing as a military (rather than a diplomatic) figurehead and displays the virtues of an uncompromising man, with the emphasis firmly on 'man' rather than 'human'. Testimony to this is the memory culture cast in stone and metal at the Heroes Acre, built in a similar fashion to the one in Harare by the same North Korean company at the outskirts of Windhoek 10 years into independence. The cultivation of the military liberation gospel is revealing. The massively oversized statue of the ‘Unknown Soldier’, as well as the physiognomy of the leader in the relief, leaves no doubt about the intended connotation. Subtleties were never a virtue of Namibian political culture.

Just as enlightening as this monumental symbolism is the content of Nujoma’s autobiography, Where Others Wavered, which served as screenplay for the hitherto by far most expensive film financed by Namibian taxpayers’ money (not for local producers but Hollywood professionals). Significantly, a quote from the struggle days was chosen as the programmatic title of Nujoma’s life history, which ends with independence (although published almost a decade into the sovereign republic). The leitmotiv tells it all: 'When the history of a free and independent Namibia is written one day, SWAPO [South West Africa People's Organisation] will go down as having stood firm where others have wavered: that it sacrificed for the sacred cause of liberation where others have compromised.'

An in-depth, exclusive interview with Nujoma in the magazine ‘New Africa’ of November 2003 confirms this particular liberation perspective. When asked why – as his biography claims – he had sent all three of his sons into battle, he answered: 'The struggle was supposed to be fought by all Namibians.' When the interviewer enquired what would have been done had they all been killed, Nujoma responded: 'Well, but the liberation of our country was supposed to be done by all Namibians irrespective of birth.'

The combat mindset leaves neither room for doubts nor for true mourning. The interviewer refers to the Cassinga massacre, in which the South African army bombarded a refugee camp in southern Angola in the late 1970s, as 'a very emotional event'. In response, Nujoma offers a vivid description of the gruesome attack:

'On 4 May 1978, the Boers sent a wave of Buccaneer aircrafts over Cassinga. The first bombs they dropped were filled with poisoned gas, biological weapons, that destroyed the oxygen in the air and made our people collapse. The Boers then sent a second wave of Mirage jetfighters to strafe the camp and set it ablaze. They then sent yet a third wave of helicopters that dropped paratroopers into the camp. They proceeded to shoot and bayonet our people who had not already died from the bombing. As you correctly stated, they killed more than 1,000 and injured many more. They even took some of our people away.'

Again there is no indication of empathy. But the interviewer continues: 'When something like this happened during the struggle, how did you feel? Did you cry? Have you ever cried?' Nujoma’s full response: 'Well, we were then in New York negotiating with the apartheid regime and the Western Contact Group made up of Canada and Germany (as non-members of the Security Council) and France, Britain and the US (as members). So we just walked out of the discussion and returned to Africa. We re-organised ourselves and intensified the armed struggle.'

It was as if the struggle was a technical matter, mere surgery, involving no human beings and to be executed by inanimate dummies. The rhetoric of liberation can be rather invasive. It has its framework set in the paradigm of victory and/or defeat, and leaves no room for empathy, not to mention grief and tears. This was possibly – and sadly so – even necessary to stand any chance of survival and ultimately become successful in ‘the struggle against the Boers’. Such testimony might also offer some insight into the process of how victims, as liberators, might turn into perpetrators when in control and wielding power. They gave away their humanity and in return expected unconditional loyalty from others to a kind of struggle, which remains an everlasting act of patriotism and service.

In such a mindset is no space for retirement. One can leave office but will remain a leader with responsibilities. It might well be that such first-generation anti-colonialists are necessary, even though they at the same time reflect the limits of liberation and the price at which national sovereignty comes to many among the people.

Formal self-determination in a sovereign state does not equate individual liberty and freedom (not to speak of social equality in economic terms!). But it has shifted the struggle for true emancipation. We owe it to the Sam Nujomas in this world that we have reached this next, so much less violent phase, fighting for rights. They sacrificed their humanity for others, but expected others to sacrifice theirs too. Will history absolve them?

* Henning Melber is the executive director of the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation in Uppsala, Sweden. Melber joined the South West Africa People's Organisation (SWAPO) in 1974. A shorter version of this text will be published in the May issue of Insight Namibia.
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