• Sam Nujoma, the freedom fighter who led Namibia to independence from apartheid South Africa in 1990 and served as his country’s first President, passed away on February 8. He was 95.

• Nujoma rose to head the thinly populated southern African country on March 21, 1990 and was formally recognised as “Founding Father of the Namibian Nation” through a 2005 Act of Parliament.

• The face of the larger-than-life, white-bearded liberator appears on several Namibian dollar notes. A six-metre tall statue of Nujoma greets visitors outside the Namibian Independence Museum.

• Streets have been named after him at home and also in other countries in Southern Africa.

The rise of a liberator

• Nujoma was born in a village in northwestern Namibia in 1929, when his country was under South African administration. South Africa had controlled Namibia since World War One after a brutal few decades of German colonial rule remembered for the genocide of the Herero and Nama people.

• As a boy he looked after his family’s cattle and attended a Finnish mission school, before moving to the coastal town of Walvis Bay and then the capital Windhoek, where he worked for South African Railways.

• There, he met Herero tribal chief Hosea Kutako who was lobbying to end apartheid rule in Namibia, then known as South West Africa.

• Kutako became his mentor, shepherding Nujoma as he became politically active among black workers resisting a government order to move to a new township in the late 1950s.

• At Kutako’s request, Nujoma began life in exile in 1960, leaving his wife and four children behind.

• That same year, he was elected president of the South West Peoples' Organisation (SWAPO).

• He travelled across Africa before reaching the United States, where he petitioned the United Nations for Namibia’s independence.

• SWAPO launched an armed struggle in 1966 after neighbouring South Africa refused a UN order to give up its mandate over the former German colony.

• Nujoma established its armed wing and in 1966 launched a guerrilla war against the apartheid government.

• It took more than a decade of pressure from Nujoma and others before a UN Security Council resolution in 1978 proposed a ceasefire and elections, and another decade for the ceasefire deal to be signed.

• The resource-rich sub-Saharan country finally wrested its independence in 1990, becoming one of the last countries in Africa to do so.

• Nujoma won the first democratic election in 1990 and over his three terms presided over a period of relative economic prosperity and political stability.

• Nujoma served his three terms as president from 1990 to 2005 and sought to project himself as a unifying leader bridging political divides.

• In a country scarred by the legacy of apartheid and German colonial rule, Nujoma’s SWAPO party oversaw a national reconciliation programme under the motto ‘One Namibia, One Nation’.

• But his autocratic tendencies, on display in his treatment of the media and brutal suppression of the 1999 Caprivi rebellion, cast a shadow over his legacy.

• His handpicked successor Hifikepunye Pohamba easily won election and took over as President in 2005. But Nujoma was still seen as the power behind the throne and did not officially retire from politics for another two years.

(The author is a trainer for Civil Services aspirants.)