Sam Nujoma, the founding president of an impartial Namibia, who led a Soviet-backed guerrilla military in an uneven battle in opposition to the vastly superior forces of white-ruled South Africa in a victory that owed a lot to the dynamics of the Chilly Battle, died on Saturday. He was 95.
Mr. Nujoma died in Windhoek, Namibia’s capital, in keeping with the nation’s present president, Nangolo Mbumba, who introduced the dying on Sunday. His assertion didn’t give a explanation for dying however mentioned that the previous president had been hospitalized with an sickness for 3 weeks.
A bearded, bespectacled man given to buying and selling his camouflage fatigues for enterprise fits, relying on his viewers, Mr. Nujoma pursued twin tracks of diplomacy and insurgency in a decades-long quest for the liberation of his nation — a sprawling however sparsely populated former German colony that Pretoria dominated in defiance of the United Nations.
When independence lastly got here in March 1990, although, it was the product of a United States-brokered deal to safe South Africa’s withdrawal in return for a pullout by 50,000 Cuban troopers from neighboring Angola, which had offered a vital rear base for Mr. Nujoma’s guerrillas.
Mr. Nujoma and his South-West Africa Individuals’s Group, often known as Swapo, which was shaped in 1960 after he fled Namibia in exile, performed no direct half within the negotiations that led to the settlement. And although Mr. Nujoma adopted a nom de guerre — shafiishuna, or lightning — there was no report of his direct participation in fight.
For years, South Africa’s white rulers had insisted that Namibia, which they referred to as South-West Africa, was the ultimate buffer in opposition to the southward advance of Communist affect in Africa. So when the Soviet Union collapsed, Pretoria’s oft-repeated declare to be a pro-Western bulwark in opposition to Moscow’s encroachment misplaced its relevance.
As independence approached, Mr. Nujoma’s social gathering deserted what some had depicted as a drive for a Marxist one-party state, and agreed to multiparty elections and a democratic Structure that appeared to bolster his longstanding insistence that he was a nationalist fairly than an ideologue.
Nonetheless, many analysts detected an autocratic streak. Re-elected to a second time period in 1994, he oversaw a constitutional change that allowed him to run for a 3rd time period within the 1999 elections, ignoring an earlier dedication to time period limits.
A full obituary will observe.
Erin Mendell contributed reporting.