A movie, Namibia: The Liberation Struggle (2005), written and directed by the US director Charles Burnett with US actors Carl Lumbly and Danny Glover - and made in Namibia with massive state funds to augment the propaganda image of the country's first President, Sam Nujoma - was broadcast last year in seven episodes by the state broadcaster, the Namibian Broadcasting Corporation (NBC), starting shortly ahead of the country's presidential and parliamentary elections, as a taxpayer-funded boost for the ruling SWAPO party.
It had been filmed originally as Namibia: Where Others Wavered, its title identical with that of Nujoma's autobiography, Where Others Wavered (Panaf Books, 2001).
Not surprisingly, the SWAPO government and Nujoma's lifelong ally and subordinate, former President Hifikepunye Pohamba, were re-elected in late November, with a resounding majority of over 75 percent of the vote each.
In the words of one fair-minded young Namibian woman who saw the film abroad before its party-political propaganda role in Namibia on NBC, "the victory and success of the liberation struggle is credited to one man: Nujoma. The last 40 or so minutes of the film is nothing more than shameless hero worship of the worst kind."
Shortly before its first episode was screened on NBC, a more informed critique of the film's flawed historical context was made by the former SWAPO member, exile and human rights campaigner, Phil ya Nangoloh, whose brother Jerry Israel Ipumbu was one of scores of SWAPO members murdered by Nujoma's coterie in exile for daring to criticise his role, and even for being suspected of one day maybe coming to criticise it.
In the Acknowledgements to his autobiography, Nujoma writes that "it was Mr Randolph Vigne, founder member and President of the then Namibia Support Committee in London, who contributed a great deal in helping to draft the initial version, and I am greatly indebted to him." (page vii) Mr Vigne was a leader of the former Liberal Party in South Africa , a leader of the National Committee for Liberation/African Resistance Movement sabotage organisation in South Africa in the early 1960s and is the author of Liberals Against Apartheid: A History of the Liberal Party of South Africa, 1953-68 (Macmillan, London/St Martins Press, New York, 1997). In this book, Vigne writes of "the Swapo-Liberal Party alliance" which "formed the basis of an enduring association, mainly among Liberals and Swapo in exile, and later in independent Namibia ". (p.186)
In truth, Nujoma's autobiography is a travesty, at variance in crucial passages with the published historical record and worthless as a contribution to clarifying the most critical periods in SWAPO's nearly three decades in exile. Needless to say, it is this that provides the sole narrative foundation for the state-funded propaganda film screened for Namibians to guide their vote in the elections last November, assisted by the glamour of the Hollywood star system.
Where Others Wavered, the title of Nujoma's autobiography and the original title of the Burnett-Lumbly-Glover film, is itself the opposite of the truth, designed to conceal the fact that the great waverer in Namibia's political history of the last 40 years was Nujoma himself.
Nujoma's great waver relates to his willing participation as SWAPO president in the invasion of Angola in 1975 by the South African Defence Force, during the so-called "Detente" exercise by then US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the South African President, John Vorster, in close association with former Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda. At that time, SWAPO was totally dependent on Zambia for bases for its military action against South African rule in Namibia . Fearful that a military victory for the Marxist MPLA party in Angola would mean an expansion of Soviet influence on Zambia 's borders, following the collapse of Portuguese rule in Africa the previous year, Kaunda exerted the full force of the state on Nujoma to assist the SADF in its invasion, as well as to nullify resistance to it.
And Nujoma complied.
This collusion with the apartheid state understandably provoked extensive opposition within SWAPO, based mainly among members of the SWAPO Youth League and SWAPO's army, the People's Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN), in western Zambia , but extending also into the SWAPO Central Committee and even to its founder members, Andreas Shipanga and Solomon Mifima. This was suppressed by force by the Zambian army, in cooperation with the Tanzanian state, then headed by President Julius Nyerere.
When the "Detente" exercise collapsed - following the "air bridge" of Cuban troops and materiel into the Angolan theatre on the side of the MPLA - Nujoma concealed his own role by accusing his critics of treason and collaboration with imperialism. With the assistance of Joe Slovo of the South African Communist Party and Oliver Tambo, then acting president of the African National Congress in exile, he mended his fences with the Brezhnev regime in the Soviet Union and with the victorious MPLA, in return receiving Soviet political support and bases for SWAPO in southern Angola.
Hundreds of Nujoma's critics never survived to return to Namibia .
The matter is established in a number of well-documented and accepted histories, all published long before Nujoma's autobiography, let alone its recent movie phantasmagoria.
These sources include:
RW Johnson, How Long Will South Africa Survive? (Macmillan, London, 1978)
Sue Armstrong, In Search of Freedom: The Andreas Shipanga Story as told to Sue Armstrong (Ashanti, Gibralter, 1989)
John S Saul and Colin Leys (eds), Namibia's Liberation Struggle: The Two-Edged Sword (James Currey, London/Ohio University Press, 1995)
Pastor Siegfried Groth, Namibia: The Wall of Silence (Peter Hammer Verlag, Wuppertal/distributed in South Africa by David Philip, 1995)
Lauren Dobell, Swapo's Struggle for Namibia, 1960-1991: War by Other Means (P Schlettwein Publishing, Basel , 2000).
To this I would add historical articles which I published in London in the banned South African exile magazine, Searchlight South Africa, between 1990 and 1993, three of which were republished in South Africa last year in my book, Inside Quatro: Uncovering the Exile History of the ANC and SWAPO (Jacana, Johannesburg, 2009).
Ex-President Nujoma's distortion of history became a political issue in Namibia again last month, as well as in Zambia, with a sharp interchange of conflicting interpretations between Phil ya Nangoloh (as director of the Namibian National Society for Human Rights) and President Rupiah Banda of Zambia, during the course of President Banda's state visit to Namibia. Banda had been a leading actor in Kissinger-Vorster "Detente" operation, as Foreign Minister in Kaunda's government. Together with Kaunda and his special adviser, Mark Chona, Banda had taken part in secret discussions in 1975 with President Vorster of South Africa , the South African Foreign Minister, Hilgard Muller, and Major-General Hendrik van den Bergh, the immensely feared head of the South African secret police force, the Bureau of State Security (BOSS).
True to form, President Banda accused ya Nangoloh of "working for the people who colonised us". The interchange between ya Nangoloh and Banda can be followed on the website, Zambian Watchdog, here:
This conflict between State President and human rights campaigner in turn provoked interest two weeks ago in afrol News, a website with a focus on Africa, which sought clarification from a range of historical sources to establish the truth about this turning point in the recent history of southern Africa.
In an article, "History battle: Zambia's dubious role in Namibia's freedom fight", the editor of afrol News, Rainer Hennig, firmly established that President Banda's blanket dismissal of the points made by ya Nangoloh was not supported by the historical evidence.
Hennig's headline term, "History battle", derives from the German term Historikerstreit (or conflict between historians), the name given to a conflict between German historians in the late 1980s over interpretation of the Nazi Holocaust. It accurately pinpoints the major conflict in accounts concerning Namibian and Zambian events from a quarter century ago, with a searching light on the actual roles - as opposed to propaganda bombast - of ex-President Nujoma of Namibia and reigning President Banda of Zambia .
All the more does this renewed attention to one of the most important "history battles" in southern Africa re-emphasise the need for an independent international commission of inquiry, with a role for respected international as well as southern African scholars, in order to establish the main elements of truth beyond question. This is in direct contrast with the tendentious cover-up represented by Nujoma's autobiography, and the abuse of Namibian state funds in production of a flim-flam movie glorifying the former President like a god.
The historian and philosopher whose writing initiated the Historikerstreit, Ernst Nolte, Professor Emeritus at the Free University of Berlin, provided this article, published in 1986, with a title, Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will - "The past, which will not go away."
The current Historikerstreit in Namibia makes clear that Nujoma's past, too, "will not go away".
Click here to sign up to receive our free daily headline email newsletter
