SWAPO Captive - A comrade’s experience of betrayal and torture by Oiva Angula (Zebra Press, South Africa R 230/ 179pp.)
A regius professor of theology at Oxford University was forced in May this year (2018) to hold an academic conference on colonialism in private because he feared it would be disrupted by activists from the Rhodes Must Fall generation of students.
French judges have dropped a long –running investigation into the killing of former Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, which triggered countrywide violence and 800,000 deaths during the 100 days that followed because the probe is causing tension between France and Rwanda.
Britain’s top military brass has called on Theresa May to introduce a statute of limitations to prevent prosecutions because British veterans could face allegations of wrong-doing from decades-old End of Empire Operations.
Claims against Britons who served in Malaysia and Cyprus more than half a century ago could emerge and cost taxpayers millions of pounds after an attempt by 40,000 Kenyans to sue the government for alleged maltreatment in the 1950s.
Top-secret papers hidden for 50 years at the close British government archive in Hanslope Park, Buckinghamshire, contain allegations of torture by officers from Special Branch and evidence that British forces killed people in custody in Kenya, Cyprus, Malaysia then closed ranks to avoid prosecution.
And at a one-day Institute of Commonwealth Studies seminar held at The Senate, London University, on 20 June 2012 Professor Wm. Roger Louis of the University of Austin at Texas, USA told academics and journalists that had it not have been for the Kenyan claims which created the need for evidence demanded by the court as part of legal procedure, the archives in all probability would never have been disclosed. They contain examples of police force brutality in 37 colonial administrations and are known in Commonwealth circles as the Hanslopean Documents.
Professor Louis is editor-in-chief of the Oxford History of the British Empire and author of “Ends of British Imperialism - The Scramble for Empire, Suez and De-colonisation” (I.B. Tauris, 2006 pp. 1, 065).
With that in mind, let’s give a resounding welcome to Oiva Angula, author of a new book about SWAPO, the party which came to power in Namibia and 1990 and which has been there ever since. The book has caused fists, as well as eyebrows, to be lifted in the country which is preparing for elections next year.
Let’s also say three cheers to Namibia for not taking further steps to hide away from a vast array of unpalatable facts contained in this new enthralling book by a man of undoubted integrity and courage.
SWAPO Captive – a Comrade’s Experience of Betrayal and Torture is a gripping account of a young nationalist freedom fighter who, at the age of 19, left his Windhoek home to join the liberation movement’s military wing, PLAN.
After working for the movement as a journalist and political instructor he was branded as an apartheid spy and traitor during a series of Stalin-esque purges and “trials” within the organization. The publisher’s blurb at the back correctly says that this is a book that partly tells Angula’s terrifying account of betrayal and torture by his former comrades and his imprisonment for four and a half years in the omalango – the hidden pits in Lubango, Angola, into which he and many others were cast and left to die.
Jemima Beukes of Namibia Media Holdings in Namibia writes, after recounting the early days of the author -“Angula has penned a tell-all expose of life as a SWAPO captive in the infamous dungeons where the ruling party turned on its own and unleashed untold suffering. Angula describes how he was stripped and whipped night and day, while hopes of him and other prisoners ever returning to Namibia faded. Certain SWAPO members reportedly used the dungeons in the Angola town to either eliminate or terrorise suspected dissidents.”
She adds: “It also reveals how the SWAPO captives had hoped that a visit in 1986 by the then Commander-in-Chief of the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN), Sam Nujoma, would bring relief.”
No relief came.
When Nujoma finally arrived with senior security officers, the whole atmosphere was tense. The author writes- “We were lined up some 100 meters from the three pits. Inmates from nearby pits also joined us. Nujoma appeared before us, beefy in a brownish camouflage uniform, frowning and uneasy, through making no effort to conceal his self-importance.”
Rather than find out what had happened or seek a reason why young fighters would turn against him, Nujoma branded the lot “reactionaries” and said they’d all be paraded at Freedom Square once Namibia was free.
”With great bitterness,” Angula says, "I instantly realised that Nujoma had deserted us. He had failed us, he was the betrayer, not me.”
Writes Paul Trewhela who was imprisoned by the apartheid regime in South Africa from 1964-1967 and is author of the seminal Inside Quatro (Jacanda Media, 2010) which revealed so much about the way the ANC treated its “dissidents” in Angolan camps: “It’s such a terrible and shameful story, not least his (Angula’s) factual incitement of the saga of the entire range of Christian churches internationally which shut eyes and ears to the truth rather than be accused of being racists, reactionary.”.
Angula writes (p. 134) “The church was an inseparably part of the liberation struggle. The bishops apparently fearing undermining the struggle, tolerated an unjust and deadly situation, allowing it to prevail. It became clear that the spiritual capacity of the church in Namibia to affect the truth, to confront injustice within SWAPO, had crumbled. The disgraceful conduct of church leaders, with some honourable exceptions, was defined by a dogged refusal to promote any serious investigation, and an enigmatic decision to muffle the grave allegations that piled up against SWAPO.”
The silence about abuses within African liberation movements by so many Christian leaders is disgraceful.
Angula writes: ”Rev Gunnar Stalsett, a former bishop of Norway, travelled to Angola to meet with SWAPO leaders. On its return, the delegation declared that it “found no evidence for the validity of the allegations against SWAPO. Even church leaders from Namibia repeated this upon returning from meeting with SWAPO leaders.”
For years, European liberals and various Christian leaders did their level best to play down – even ignore – the outrageous treatment Nujoma handed out to his critics.
“And no TRC,” says Trewhela. ”No official recognition in Namibia for the past 30 years. It’s taken a generation for this book to be written and published (in South Africa) which speaks for itself.”
And so many more cases to be examined.
When long hidden-away files are opened up in Britain, Zambia and Tanzania the reputations of idiotically acclaimed secular saints like Kenneth Kaunda and Julius Nyerere are certain to be dented, if not destroyed. As Oscar Wilde said : “A halo doesn’t have to fall far to become a noose.”
The journalist Fred Bridgland has done more than anyone to keep the story alive of the appalling fate of Andrea Shipanga, another of Nujoma’s key men turned “traitor.”
The SWAPO revolt of 1975/1976 would never have been told had Bridgland –then with Reuters - not risked his life and his career by revealing how Nujoma allowed SWAPO and PLAN to side for a while with South Africa and Jonas Savimbi’s’ UNITA in the war against the quasi- Marxist MPLA in Angola.
Kenneth Kaunda’s “Kissinger-like” adviser, Mark Chona, managed to secure the withdrawal by Reuters of Bridgland from Zambia. The English journalist had been told too much, seen too much and written far too much about a man various Western liberals worshipped and would hear no critical word against.
What power these self-seeking suckers wielded in those far-away days. How even now they spread what the poet Louis Macneice called “the myth of themselves” in books, films and memoirs. They never stop.
Says Bridgland –“The time is now ripe and right to expose all the cruelties and hypocrisies of the SWAPO leadership in exile, regardless of political correctness.”
Hopefully the excellent “In Search of Freedom - The Andreas Shipanga Story as told to Sue Armstrong“ (Ashanti Publishing, 1989) will be revised, updated and re-published by an enterprising and imaginative publishing house in South Africa , Britain or some other Commonwealth country..
I’m told that Angula’s book is selling well despite assertions by the SWAPO Party Youth League Secretary Ephraim Nekongo that Angula is picking at an old wound, re-opening it to sway voters away from the ruling party next year.
Angula’s book was launched on November 3 (2018) at a Cuban-owned restaurant in Eros, a suburb of Windhoek. Loads of people bought the book. Few planned to attend the launch, nervous for obvious reasons. But over 50 attended the ceremony.
Angula told men and women with his book in their hands about the nightmares that haunt his sleep, the flashbacks about the Lubango pits haunting is waking hours. A horrified hush settled on those in the room.
After a pretty thorough reading of two books on similar subjects – Armstrong and Bridgland on Shipanga and Angula on himself, I hoped South Africans and Namibians would not follow the example of cowardly academics at Oxford University – holding their seminars behind closed doors, like besieged monks in some walled Medieval City.
To be truly human we need to know where we’ve come from in order to understand where we are now and where we might be in years to come.
The need to do this is captured in a quote on an opening page in Angula’s timely and important book and it is a quote from Roberto Cabrera, the Guatemalan human rights activist. He said this:
“When considering the question should we remember? It is very important to firstly ask, has any victim forgotten? Could they ever forget? Secondly we should ask, who wants to forget? Who benefits when all the atrocities stay silent in the past? Finally, remembering should be linked to new dreams. There is no point in looking back if it does not help us to dream and create a better future.”
