…Whites claim they support the new order, but they don’t and stay away in droves from state functions on national days. An uneasy social compact prevails.White economic hegemony is maintained with the tacit approval of international finance capital, which finances the Namibian system.
On the part of the Africans – they are consumed by their pre-occupations around class formation. So much so that they are prepared to squabble and fight in the full glare of international opinion. All of which had lead to a certain kleptomania, so that the state in 2006 set up an Anti-Corruption Commission, to put a lid-on wanton accumulation by the elites. The majority of the black population remains marginalized and poor.
After 1918, with the ending of the First World War South West Africa / Namibia was administered by South Africa under a C Mandate of the League of Nations on behalf of Great Britain. Rather than looking after the welfare of the people of the territory South Africa sought to annex the territory and exploit its resources. Due to the global configuration of the times no power intervened to rectify this injustice. As late as the 1980’s President Ronald Reagan in the USA, supported by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the UK, saw nothing wrong with the pursuit of what was called ‘constructive engagement’, which in effect meant support for the apartheid state.
African nationalism / Pan Africanism made its first appearance in South West Africa / Namibia with the arrival of the Universal Negro Improvements Association (UNIA) and the African Communities League (ACL), which were launched in Lüderitz in 1921. In 1919 the UNIA had sent Commissioners to the Versaille Conference in an unsuccessful attempt to influence the fate of the German colonies and to bring in African leadership. Emmett ( Emmett 1988) admits that the Pan-African ideas of Garvey had impact on the political development of what was to become Namibia. The historian Zed Ngavirue acknowledges a direct Africanist link between the thinking of Garvey and the ideological direction of SWAPO Party. He makes the connection between the colours of the UNIA and those of SWAPO. Emmett states that at the end of 1921 the Lüderitz Branch of the UNIA had a membership of 311. Both the political and social needs of the members were taken care of by the Association. By January 1922 the Windhoek Branch of the UNIA was fully functional. Members included such distinguished persons as Hosea Kutako, Aaren Mungunda, Clemence Kapuuo and others who became outstanding figures in Namibian public life. Both Nama people and Ovahereros joined the Windhoek Branch. The Namibian variant of Garveyism found place in the Transkei, in South Africa in the person of Washington Buthelezi, who activated the political conscientization of the likes of Walter Sisulu, amongst others in South Africa.
In 1922 the Bondelswarts, a Nama clan, rebelled, followed in 1925 by the uprising of the Rehoboth Basters. This amounted to a rebellion against South African colonial encroachment. Unlike the experience in 1904-8 a new spirit of unity – of African nationalism – was evident. New forms of political thinking and organization had developed with a realization of the need for African unity / nationalism in the face of a militaristic intruder. This was the consequence of the infusion of Garvey’s ideas of Pan-Africanism. African Nationalism was germinated and would ultimately result in an armed struggle for African liberation. Whereas the general popular uprising inspired by Garveyism never happened, no previous set of political ideas had the impact that Garveyism had in the country and elements of Africanism remain deeply rooted in Namibian politics. This distinguishes Namibia from its neighbour South Africa. SWAPO President, H.E. Sam Nujoma is an ardent Pan Africanist and it was these sentiments which lead Namibia along with its allies Angola and Zimbabwe, to intervene militarily in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the late 1990’s, when that country was invaded. During the long years of armed struggle SWAPO was steadfast in its support for Pan Africanism. It drew important support during the period from the Liberation Committee of the Organization of African Unity (OAU). The early conscientization of Nujoma came from Garveyism.
Emmett states that the thinking which led to ‘rebelliousness’ at the Center and the South, also effected the North of the country, as witnessed by acts of Ipumbu, King of the Ukuambi Ovambos. In the event the fire power and general military capacity of the local people could not match that of the South African Administration (e.g. aircraft) and there matters rested for half a century, whereafter armed struggle was re-instituted leading to national ‘independence’.
After the Second World War, in 1946 the General Assembly of the United Nations (UN) rejected a South African proposal to incorporate the territory into the Union of South Africa and recommended that the territory be placed under the International Trusteeship System. The Union of South Africa insisted that the mandate had expired with the dissolution of the League of Nations, thus seeking to incorporate the territory as a fifth province of the Union. South Africa’s mandate to administer the territory was terminated by the United Nations General Assembly Resolution of 1966. In 1971 the continued occupation of Namibia by South Africa was declared illegal by the International Court of Justice.
In 1962 the Odendaal Commission of Inquiry was established by South Africa to recommend a plan for the development of Namibia, particularly its people of colour. Its report came out in 1963 arguing for the separate development of blacks, coloureds and whites. This was implemented in the territory in the form of a nascent Bantustan system, dividing the country along ethnic lines. The best land was reserved for the whites and the rest divided up amongst the blacks. In Southern Africa the North American classification of ‘one drop’ equaling black, does not apply. The Apartheid classification ‘coloured’ being of mixed race, is seen apart and different from black, more so in the Namibian case than seen for instance, in the Cape Province of South Africa. The amount of integration and blending of coloured and black in Namibia after independence has been virtually nil. Indeed within one year of independence the town of Rehoboth, capital of the coloured Bantustan sort to succeed from the Republic, which move was restrained by the deployment of troops around the house of the ‘Kaptein’ of the Rehoboth Basters clan. The ethnic system which was put in place in Namibia was to be duplicated within the borders of South Africa itself.
The liberation struggle - aborted
By the 1960’s armed struggle was generally adopted as the method of opposition by the liberation forces of Southern Africa. Hopes by Namibians that the outside world would help them were dashed in 1966 when the International Court of Justice passed a judgment, which established clearly that the South West Africa Peoples Organization (SWAPO) would have to fight if self government was to be achieved in the country.
On the 26th August 1966 the first armed engagement took place in South West Africa / Namibia at Omgulumbashe in the North of the country between SWAPO and the South African army. The armed struggle was initiated to achieve freedom, not ‘independence’ – being an intermediary stage, which Nkrumah called ‘ neo-colonialism ‘. Later the significance of these different categories of sovereignty was to become clear.
Of the various tendencies in the politics of liberation in South West Africa / Namibia only one took an armed expression, thus was SWAPO formed in 1960. Apart from SWAPO the other group which claimed liberation credentials was the South West Africa National Union (SWANU) which was formed in 1959, having the backing of the Herero Chiefs’ Council, in the person of Chief Hosea Kutako.
In order to contextualise the accession of Namibia to self government it is, at this point, necessary to introduce the regional and international scenario. In August 1965 the first Cuban volunteers arrived in Africa to support the Congo Government in Brazzaville and the struggle of People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA).
In 1974 Portuguese colonialism collapsed under the combined impact of the overthrow of the fascist Lisbon dictatorship and the rising freedom movements in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde, which sort full sovereign status for these territories, which were considered integral departments of metropolitan Portugal. On the 10th of January 1975 the Alvor Agreement was signed by Portugal establishing a transitional government in Angola, with independence set for 11th November of that year. In October 1975 South Africa invades Angola from South West Africa / Namibia. On the 5th November 1975 at the request of the MPLA the Cuban Communist Party sent a battalion of Cuban troops on urgent basis to Angola. As stated by the Cuban leader ‘…to help the Angolan patriots resist the invasion of the South African racists…’ ( Deutschmann 1989). On 10th December at the First Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba, Castro announced the presence of Cuban troops in Angola, explaining ‘We are a Latin-African nation…African blood flows through our veins’ (Deutchmann 1989). Cuba sent the troops necessary for the MPLA in Angola to win its war against armed invading elements supported by non-African powers. Some 60% or more of the Cuban soldiers your author saw in Luanda, Angola in the period 1984-6 were of African descent.
When the Cuban internationalists arrived in Angola foreign interventionists from Congo / Kinshasa were 25 kilometres North of Luanda and were shelling the suburbs. The South African army had penetrated 700 kilometres inside the Southern Angolan border from South West Africa / Namibia. Thus the Cuban Internationalist role began in Southern Africa, which was ultimately to lead to self government in Namibia and South Africa, what Deutschmann calls ‘Changing the history of Africa’. Fidel Castro (Deustchmann 1989) the Cuban leader made it clear that Cuba’s involvement in Southern Africa was its decision, not that of the Soviet Union (USSR).
Originally Headquartered in Tanzania SWAPO had moved its headquarters to Lusaka in 1968. Throughout the 1970’s thousands of Namibians voted with their feet, going into exile to join SWAPO, which also had an internal wing in the country, which was under constant South African surveillance and harassment.
The main SWAPO settlement was in Southern Angola, at a place called Cassinga. Other health and education facilities existed elsewhere in Angola and Zambia. In 1978 South African troops attacked Cassinga killing over 600 of its inhabitants. The Cassinga massacre was the single most murderous engagement in the Namibian armed struggle.
In the Special Namibian Supplement to the issue of the journal ‘New African’ of November 2003, SWAPO President Sam Nujoma is quoted as follows:-
‘You see, in 1982, eight years before independence, the British and the Americans had formulated and imposed on us the so-called Constitutional Principles document to favour the interest of individual white settlers who by ‘hook or by crook’ had acquired Namibian land during the colonial era. I want to emphasize here that the inclusion in our Constitution of a clause concerning commercial lands, the so-called ‘willing seller, willing buyer’ clause, which serves to perpetuate the status quo of inequity in land distribution in Namibia, was never in line with SWAPOs position in addressing the land question. This clause has resulted in the current land problem we have in the country’
Namibia’s future, in as much as liberation from South African settler colonialism was concerned, was co-joined with Angola and Cuba. The last move of SWAPO before its headquarters returned to Windhoek, was to Angola. On the 10th September 1986 the Cuban Head of State stated, whilst on visit to Angola, that the 40,000 Cuban troops in Angola would remain there until South Africa withdrew from Angola and Namibia.
On the 15th December 1987 Angola announced a new policy by asking the Cuban troops to patrol Southern Angola, with orders to engage South African troops in combat. On the 13th of January 1988 the first South African assault in the decisive battle for the liberation of Southern Africa, began in Cuito Cuanavale. Ranged opposing the South Africans were the Cubans, the Angolans and the Namibians. The South African offensive went on till March 1988, but was repulsed. On the 1st of April 1988 South Africa announced its troop withdrawals from Angola and in 1988 the peace plan for Namibia was agreed and signed in New York at the United Nations, by virtue of UN Resolution 435. In 1990 the Constitution was adopted and on 21st March 1990 Namibian ‘independence’ was proclaimed. It must be noted that there was ‘no fight to the finish’ in any of the Southern African wars of decolonisation. In Zimbabwe, Namibia, South Africa, Angola and Mozambique peace always came by way of negotiated settlement, unlike in South East Asia. In 1982, under Western guidance SWAPO had accepted, in the Cap Verdes Islands, the ‘Constitutional Principles’; based on western values, in order to move forward the peace process. Because freedom was not won on the battlefield, self-government was compromised and those who had fought for liberation were not properly recognized for the role they had played.
Qualifying democracy
Apartheid settler colonialism had left the country at two extremes, with a white male dominated minority elite living in first world conditions and the majority African population living in poverty. The states which emerged were not sovereign, but neo- colonial. State authority did not include the commanding heights of the economy, which remains in the hands of minority whites and transnational overseas capital, with governance residing with a small black political power elite, in alliance with white capital. This arrangement will remain in place for the foreseeable future, but it fails to meet the expectations, which engendered the struggle for freedom.
Even after ‘independence’ was proclaimed in Namibia, one of the groups supposedly fighting for Angolan freedom, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) within Angola, continued to unsettle the peace in Namibia. UNITA, lead by Jonas Savimbi, had been aligned to racist South Africa and maintained a presence in Southern Angola, from where it crossed into Namibia after independence to create mayhem. It also traded in contraband and diamonds, all of which disturbed the population of Northern Namibia, especially Kavango and Caprivi. UNITA’s interference in Northern Namibia obliged those traveling from Rundu in the Kavango Region to Katima Mulilo in Caprivi Region in the North East of the country, to travel under convoy. In a sense Caprivi was being isolated from the rest of the country, so that when a short-lived Caprivi armed rebellion erupted in Katima Mulilo in the Caprivi Region in 1999, with connections with UNITA, nobody was surprised. It was only when Savimbi was killed some ten years after Namibia’s independence, that Namibia enjoyed full peace.
Democracy is not a given and must be fought for and jealously safeguarded. Some states such as France went through a republican revolution to reach the stage of pluralistic democracy, after a long period of experimentation and refinement. Namibia arrived at Western liberal democracy via a negotiated settlement, after an armed struggle and the deliberations of a Constituent Assembly. Thereafter the ruling SWAPO Party claimed that certain clauses of the Constitution were not of its making and were rather foisted on the people of Namibia during the period leading to independence.
The impact of the events of the 9th November 2001 in New York, in the United States of America (USA), when two aircraft were crashed into the Twin Tours Buildings, also had resonance in Canada and parts of Europe. Civil liberties came under attack. Rights to privacy were trampled upon. All of which was combined by an increase in xenophobia in the USA, wiped up by politicians looking for attention. It reached the international media that the United States of America was mistreating prisoners of war at its Guantanamo military prison on Cuba. Democracy is a fragile entity and any state from one moment to another can pass from democracy to autocracy, depending on social dynamics.
The Constitution
The Constitution of Namibia was decided by the Constituent Assembly elected during the United Nations supervised elections of November 1989. The fact that Namibia was in a sense, a child of the international community / United Nations and that it received self government late, as compared with other African countries, meant that it should have been better placed to learn from the experiences of other countries, in its Constitution drafting process.
In 1982 the Western Contact Group of nations, who were involved in the process towards Namibia’s self-government, proposed a number of Constitutional Principles as Appendages to UN Security Council Resolution 435, which embodied the peace plan for Namibia’s Constitution. SWAPO accepted these Constitutional Principles as a basis for the Namibian Constitution
The Constitution which emerged from the Assembly was hailed internationally as an excellent representative of liberal democracy, able to hold its own under scrutiny as compared to any other Constitution in the world, but it had already been compromised by the 1982 Constitutional Principles. The Constitution enshrined the cardinal principles of democracy, that of the separation of powers, dividing government into three components – the Executive (law implementing), the Legislative (law making), and the Judiciary (law interpretation and enforcement).
In Namibia executive power is vested in the President and the Cabinet, who institute laws and ensure that they are implemented. Legislative power resides with Parliament (National Assembly – enacting and National Council – reviewing). The authority of the Judiciary lies in the courts of Namibia, being the Supreme Court, the High Court and the Lower Courts, which are independent. The Constitution of Namibia is an enlightened document in the Western frame of democracy. It contains all the provisions expected in a constitution of a western democracy, incorporating issues such as gender equality, but the fact that the state is denied control of the land, flaws the document fatally.The Constitution does not provide for gay rights.
The Constitution includes a chapter on fundamental human rights and freedoms, which cannot be amended or repealed in a way that would diminish any of the enshrined rights. These rights include freedom of expression, freedom of association and freedom of religion. This chapter also ensures the right to own property, while giving the government the right to expropriate property if just compensation is paid on the basis of willing seller – willing buyer.Since the enactment of the Constitution some trade unionists and SWAPO politicians have called for the removal of some of the ‘rights and freedoms’ of the 1982 principles, arguing that they were imposed...
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Political Parties
