Namibia was originally called South West Africa by its colonizer Germany. It covers a total area of 824,261 sq.km. It has a population of 2 million (1998). Her capital city is Windhoek. The official language but other languages include Afrikaner, Ovambo and Herero.

Namibia has valuable minerals scattered all over the country. The reason why its economy depends on mining such minerals like gold, diamond, uranium, copper, zinc, sea salt and many others. Fishing is another major economic activity.

Like any other African country, Namibia came under colonial rule in 1884. The Germans used force to rule, took other peoples' land and independence was lost. The first uprising to resist the German was among the Herero people and was followed by that of the Name in 1905. Germans defeated all these.

However, when German was defeated in the World War 1, all her colonies were transferred to the League of Nations. In 1919 South Africa was given the trust to prepare, develop and organize Namibia for independence but instead this turned to be a colony of South Africa.

The South African rule was worse than the German one. They took all the fertile land, introduced the Bantustan settler arrangement, they also made Namibia South Africa's fifth province despite lack of UN' consent.

In 1966, the UN General assembly voted to terminate South Africa's mandate and to resume responsibility for the territory. The council for South West Africa was appointed in 1967. It recommended that south West Africa be renamed Namibia but South Africa rejected UN's influence there.

In 1971, International court of Justice ruled out that South Africa should leave Namibia immediately. South could not accept. What followed was for UN to recognize South West African Peoples Organization (SWAPO) as the authentic representative of the people of Namibia.

Despite the dictatorial rule of the South Africans, the Namibians organized themselves to resist. Following the UNO failure to implement its resolutions on Namibia, the Ovambo people's organization was formed in 1957 by Sam Nujoma to fight for Namibia is independence. In 1960, the movement transformed itself into SWAPO.

SWAPO set up bases in neighbouring countries like Angola and with the help of the international community continued to fight for Namibia's independence. Another organization formed by the Herero people was known as South West African National Union (SWANU). However its members later on crossed to SWAPO.

SWAPO' aim was to liberate Namibia from South Africa so that the people could enjoy the peace, human dignity, liberty and all sorts of freedom. They used guerilla tactics of fighting characterized by surprise attack, ambush, moving in small groups. Many of the members went to Algeria, Egypt, Tanzania, USSR and Zambia from where they were trained. They also had good cadres who convinced the people to follow the revolution.

Swapo's first encounter with the South African army was on August 28^th 1966 in the northern border. It had some success in December 1969, it inaugurated a special military wing known as PLAN (Peoples Liberation army for Namibia) the women and the youth supported it too.

Nation wide strike was organized in 1973 in which 20,000 contract workers participated. Peoples also boycotted the Bantustan elections of 1973. They still refused to participate in electoral process under the Turnhalle (name of a hall) scheme in Windhoek. This election aimed at undermining the UN proposal for elections under international supervision. After the Turnhalle talks of 1977, an independence constitution that suggested the end of apartheid policy was made. SWAPO and the UN rejected the proposals.

The South African forces invaded Kassinga, an area in Southern Namibia, which had refugees. The reason was to have South Africans accepted in Namibia. Representatives of France, Britain, US, West Germany, Canada among others persuaded South Africa to negotiate a new plan that would meet the UN objection. Negotiations for independence were at various times between the 1970s and 1980s.

Finally in 1988, South Africa agreed on a plan under which Namibia would have her independence. With the end of the cold war, South Africa accepted a peaceful resolution and Namibia was granted independence under Sam Nujoma on 21^st March 1990. South Africa retained the area of the Walvis Bay. It handed it over in 1994.

The armed struggle by SWAPO (South West Africa People's Organization) against the illegal South African administration of South West Africa (or Namibia) began in 1966, after eleven fruitless years of non-violent protest. South Africa had been given this territory of 318 000 square miles with a 700-mile Atlantic coastline back in 1920, as a Mandate under the League of Nations. The United Nations General Assembly terminated South Africa's Mandate on 27 October 1966.

The origins of Namibian nationalism go back to the famous Nama-Herero Rising against the Germans in 1904. In the 1950s sub-nationalist ethnically-based political associations were formed, such as the Herero South West Africa National Union (1955), formed from the small Western-educated Herero intelligentsia, and the Ovamboland People's Congress, later Organization (1957), led by Sam Nujoma and Jacob Kuhangua. The Herero party broadened itself into SWANU in 1957 dropping the ethnic prefix. SWANU and OPO came-to express the growing militancy of the contract workers and had as their primary objective the ending of the contract labour system. SWANU's leaders were Toivo Herman ja Toivo, Mburumba Kerina and Jariretundu Kozonguizi. In 1959 the Chiefs' Council joined the nationalise parties in opposition to government plans to remove Windhoek Old Location to a new apartheid-style township outside the capital. A boycott of municipal services was organized, and 13 demonstrators were killed by police. In I960 the nationalists split.

The OPO had come to recognize that the ending of contract labour depended on the overthrow of colonialism itself, and reconstituted itself into SWAPO. The new party received recruits from the now faction-ridden SWANU. Over the next few years SWAPO prepared for armed struggle by sending men abroad for training in Zambia, Tanzania, Algeria, Egypt and the USSR.

The first engagement in the Namibian liberation war began on 28 August 1966, when one of several tightly armed and highly mobile SWAPO guerilla units came into contact with South African forces in the northern border zone. SWAPO was able to gain many recruits in Ovamboland in northern Namibia; although it was a national movement the party needed this ethnic base which was essential to its political strength and military success. However SWAPO also managed to recruit some non-Ovambo among contract workers and in the towns.

South Africa's response to guerilla activity was to reinforce its troops in Ovamboland and the Caprivi Strip. Its political response was to pass a 1969 Act which reduced Namibia to the status of a fifth province of South Africa, and to transform the African reserves into 'bantustans' with so-called self-governing institutions. SWAPO responded in its turn in December 1969 by holding a Congress at Tanga in Tanzania at which it inaugurated Women's and Youth Leagues and PLAN (People's Liberation Army of Namibia).

In June 1971 the International Court of Justice finally upheld UN sovereignty in Namibia. This decision inspired an upsurge of popular resistance in which for the first time the powerful churches took a lead. In December 1971 there was a nation-wide strike by over 20 000 contract workers. In January and February 1972 the mass deportation of workers to Ovamboland, which followed the strike, provoked a peasant rebellion, and encouraged a flow of recruits to SWAPO. South Africa responded by abolishing SWANLA. the monopoly recruiting organization, but allowing its functions simply to be taken over by the tribal labour bureaux, and by a brutal intensification of counter- insurgency warfare. South African forces cleared a strip of no-man's land 1-km wide along Namibia's 1000-mile -long border with Angola, removing 50 000 villagers and destroying houses, schools and clinics most of the latter having been established by the churches.

A state of emergency was declared in Ovamboland and was followed by systematic political repression, with mass arrests and detentions, widespread use of torture to extract information and to intimidate the people, and indiscriminate killings of civilians by the security forces. An attempt was made to divide the Africans by rousing ethnic antagonism. Nama-Herero- and Khoisan-speakers representing minorities were recruited to the security forces and employed against the majority Ovambo. This violent repression failed to stop the militancy of the expanding SWAPO Youth League, which led the people in the boycott of the bantustan elections in August 1973. SWAPO's call for a boycott was answered by 97.5 per cent of the electorate.

The Lisbon coup (April 1974) inspired 4000 Namibians to make their way to Angola for SWAPO military training. In September the South African Government called a constitutional conference in an attempt to arrange an internal political settlement based on self-governing bantustans. The conference met a year later (September 1975) at the Turnhalle (the name of a hall) in Windhoek, and was composed of eleven ethnic delegations mainly selected from the government-appointed chiefs in the reserves and bantustans, and the white delegation under its leader Dirk Mudge, a prominent politician of South Africa's ruling Nationalist Party.

In the meantime the MPLA government had come to power in Angola and South Africa invaded that country in support of UNITA. In March 1976 the South African army withdrew from Angola, being unable to shore up UNITA in the face of a Joint MPLA-Cuban offensive, and needing to concentrate, on resisting PLAN'S offensive from late 1975. South Africa extended the state of emergency to the whole of northern Namibia in May 1976, and built up a massive force of 50 000 soldiers in the area. In spite of this, PLAN, benefiting from Cuban and Soviet training and weapons aid in Angola, had established a regular pattern of underground activity in Ovamboland by late 1977, and was demonstrating a growing skill in making a medium -scale attacks on fixed enemy positions.

What are South Africa's motives for attempting to hold on to Namibia? The first reason is to protect the 100 000 white settlers from the majority rule of one million Africans.

The second is to prevent an increasingly radicalized SWAPO from coming to power, and instead to set up a conservative 'multi-racial' internal settlement regime as a buffer against Marxist Angola to the north, rather than allow a potentially Marxist SWAPO government to control the north bank of the Orange river.

 

SAM NUJOMA

The third reason is to keep control of the mines of Namibia in the hands of Western and South African companies. This includes the copper, lead, zinc and cadmium mines at Tsumeb in the north, Consolidated Diamond Mines' monopoly of the world's richest source of gem diamonds along the southern coast, and above all Rio Tinto Zinc's uranium mine at Rossing, so important both to the military needs of South Africa's Western trading partners and to South Africa's own nuclear industry and nuclear weapons programme.

Under pressure from Western powers following the election of Jimmy Carter as President of the United States and the influence of Andrew Young on Carter's Africa policy, the Turnhalle talks finally produced an 'independence' constitution in March 1977.