Adieu, Sam Nujoma, ‘Father of the Nation’

“The character of every people enlarges with its enfranchisement from a foreign yoke.” – Karl Marx

Marxian dialectics, the historical-materialist conception of history and the socialist perspectives on the role of the individual in history, are all aspects of intellectual inquiry and historical assessment conducted from the perspectives of revolution and change, as well as understanding the dynamics of evolution of human conditions. It was in this circumstance that such masterpieces of Marxian literature as “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” by Karl Marx and “The Role of the Individual in History” by Georgi Plekhanov were written, to contextualise the characters and delineate the actions of individuals in some epochs and contexts, that have shaped their societies for better or worse.

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Non-Marxist works such as those by the great historians Edward Gibbon and Thomas Carlyle among others, may also be cited as contributing to our understanding and appreciation of the roles of certain individuals in the advancement of ideas, politics and social transformations in their epochs and circumstances.

It is along these lines that the history of Namibia and the struggles for African liberation should be situated, and the role of Comrade Sam Nujoma should be understood and cherished for as long as Africans live and reflect on their place in this world and their contribution to human progress.

The character of the Namibian people was formed by adversity and forged by the flames of freedom that were kindled by the first freedom fighters who resisted German colonialism and experienced the first genocide in modern history. The horrors of colonialism and the brutal inhumanity of the expansionist ideology of nineteenth-century Europe were meted out and systematically executed in Namibia against a defenseless and peaceful people whose only fault was to claim their humanity and resist the inexorable desire of the foreigners to dominate and take over their posterity.

It was in this sense that the character of the Namibian people became enlarged and entrenched as the noblest of people in the African continent and the world over, by becoming enfranchised from a foreign yoke, whose characteristic was unforgiving conquest and unremitting racism, oppression and alienation of an occultist kind that could only be described as a nightmarish condition rather than a historical fact.

It was out of this nightmare and conditions of abject hopelessness that patriots stepped forward, sacrificing their comforts and lives, to take up the cudgel of freedom and fight the oppressors whether German or Boer, from across the seas or just past the border to the south. In both cases, the poor, weak and apparently ill-prepared resistance snowballed into an avalanche of national outrage and furious outpouring of the consciousness of freedom and liberation at all costs.

It was this condition that produced the legendary Sam Nujoma, leader of the South West African People’s Organisation (SWAPO) and the first President of Namibia from 1990 to 2005. The story of Africa will not be complete without a substantial narrative about Sam Nujoma being told and retold for posterity to record, and history to approve this man’s indomitable courage and spirit.

Living and dying are two sides of a coin for a revolutionary, which are also factors determined by time, place and circumstance. Sam Nujoma lived and died for a cause as a patriot, which is the greatest accomplishment of any individual imbued with the sense of purpose and mission and the resolve to change his environment to make it better than he found it. In his life, his role as an individual may not have been bigger, better or brighter than those of his ancestors who resisted the German imperialists, or his comrades, men and women, who fought for the liberation of Namibia and the restoration of the dignity of the African person.

Indeed, his place in history was secured by the total and unalloyed commitment that he gave to his country, his people and to Africa, by organising and carrying out a revolution so noble and so peerless, that history finds no other parallel to it, within the vastness of land so variegated and so oppressed, that racist exploiters held on to, with the grasping claws of dry and unfeeling skeletons that must be broken and prised open, to let go of the Namibian people and Namibian land.

Sam Nujoma’s legacy evokes the famous dictum by Karl Marx, that “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please, they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past”.

The past in Namibia’s case was the legacy of German colonialism and Boer entrenchment in the country, and the present was the determination of the Namibian people to be free and liberated from racist servitude and exploitation without the prospects of humanity or a future of hope and dignity. The present therefore, and the past are rooted and combined in the character of Namibians, forming their horizon and shaping their outlooks, as a people imbued with a sense of justice, mission and humanity, never to condone or to live with inequity and oppression, as witnessed by their attachment to the liberation of other people, whether Palestinians or other Africans, so long as their cause is just and their struggle is a factor of historical injustice.

Namibians and other Africans must tell the tale of Sam Nujoma, sitting by the campfires or in the hallowed halls of universities, not to regale the audience with fancies and romance, but with the dry facts of sacrifice, struggle and the grim determination of a revolutionary living for a cause and shutting out every sentiment and emotion of ordinary moments, that are mere trifles that must be suppressed to keep the higher purpose of living in focus, unalloyed by the intrusion of external conditions.

Writing our own history and telling our own tales must form the centrality of the struggle against imperialism and the vestiges of colonialism that have remained obstinately alive and palpably present in the reality of the global geopolitical alignments and exhibition of intolerance to other races and peoples.

We cannot and should never reduce Sam Nujoma to the status of a political leader only, but we must maintain his stature as a revolutionary and freedom fighter, in order to assert his place in history and place him in the pantheon of heroes and liberators in the same ranks as Toussaint Louverture of Haiti, Omar Mukhtar of Libya, Amir Abdelkadir of Algeria, Emperor Menelik of Ethiopia, Gamel Abdel Naser of Egypt, Nelson Mandela of South Africa, Augustinho Neto of Angola, Samora Machel of Mozambique, Dr Amilcar Cabral of Guinea-Bissau, Sekou Toure of Guinea, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, and others who lived for a cause and died for their people’s dignity.

Sam Nujoma’s legacy will remain ever fresh and vigorous as the revolution that he organised and led to free Namibia and Africa from the captive essence of colonised peoples to the elevating position of freedom and dignity that only struggle could offer and revolution could confer unstintingly and emphatically. He gave us ourselves and left us his unblemished posterity of commitment to justice, peace and human dignity.

His epitaph may be written by his successors, but it has already been written more than a century ago, when Karl Marx penned this famous sentence, “And as in private life one differentiates between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really is and does, so in historical struggles one must distinguish still more the phrases and fancies of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality”. We cannot say more or less, but only to affirm our determination to remain loyal to Africa, and to the memory of patriots such as Sam Nujoma!