No scholar, journalist or commentator identified the despotic potential already latent in the politics of the nationalist movements of southern Africa so early or so accurately as RW Johnson. A few weeks ago President Thabo Mbeki declared in Windhoek , the capital of Namibia , that South Africa or Namibia would "sink or swim together" (Mail&Guardian online, 31 October). He meant the ANC and Swapo, the governing party of Namibia since 1989. Johnson already identified the quality of despotism in Swapo thirty years ago, in his How long will South Africa survive? (Macmillan, London, 1977). Nothing comparable appeared for a further 13 years, when Searchlight South Africa - a banned journal published in exile in London - carried a first-hand interview in February 1990 with two twin sisters who had survived the horror of Swapo's prison pits in the ground at its Karl Marx Reception Centre at Lubango, in southern Angola.
As Johnson wrote in 1977, Swapo by that time was "a thing of shreds and tatters". (p.253) Since 1975 the "external (guerrilla) wing of Swapo had been racked by a major split. A large section of the leadership had launched a bitter attack against [Swapo president Sam] Nujoma for refusing to call a party congress (the last had been in 1969). Among allegations they wished to ventilate at such a congress were their claims that the leadership had connived in Zambian support of Unita [the nationalist movement in southern Angola led by the late Dr Jonas Savimbi, which allied itself with the South African Defence Force in its invasion of Angola in 1975 -ed]; that arms meant for Swapo had been diverted by [Zambian president Kenneth] Kaunda towards Unita; that Swapo forces had actually been ordered to fight alongside Unita and the invading South African columns in Angola; that the guerrilla movement was deprived of all modern arms, medicine and even food; and that the movement's leadership was riddled with corruption and inefficiency.
Swapo's purge in Zambia in 1976
"It was certainly true that Nujoma had been in alliance with Savimbi's Unita for several years, but at least by the later stages he [Nujoma] had thrown his lot in with the victorious MPLA and their Cuban backers. By mid-1976 he was being received with great éclat [acclaim- ed] by the Russians in Moscow . He alleged, grotesquely, that the dissidents were all South African agents planted in Swapo. The Swapo dissidents had annoyed Kaunda as well as Nujoma....[In] 1976 Kaunda pounced on the Swapo dissidents...the Zambian police detained eleven top Swapo leaders and a large number of lower level militants. Their leader, Andreas Shipanga, took his case to the Zambian Supreme Court. Five days before the hearing the eleven leaders were bundled on to a plane to Tanzania where they were consigned, without charge, to the ill-reputed Ukonga jail.
"Meanwhile, around 1,000 Swapo guerrillas were kept under armed Zambian guard in a prison camp. An attempted break-out by starving prisoners in August saw Zambian solders fire upon them, killing several. Nujoma, meanwhile, strengthened his links with the Angolan regime and the Soviet bloc, and began to give increasingly radical and marxist speeches. Of the dissidents he declared that they were all guilty of high treason; that there was no need for their open trial; and that the only suitable punishment would be death by firing squad." (pp.254-55) Many in fact never returned to their families in Namibia .
A global reign of silence
All of this is analysed by Johnson in the context of the coordinated drive by the then South African President, the ex-Nazi paramilitary leader Balthasar John Vorster, and the United States Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, to make and keep southern Africa safe for western interests. Swapo's foul stew of thirty years ago, brewed up by Nujoma and his cronies, was ignored in a global reign of silence of the churches, the United Nations Organisation, the respectable political parties of all shades, and the great and the good of liberal high-mindedness in all countries, headed by the Namibia Support Committee in London, which did for Namibia what the Anti-Apartheid Movement did for South Africa. Under this global shield of sanctimony, an even worse purge descended again on Swapo in exile during the Eighties, carrying off many dedicated revolutionaries. An academic study equivalent in focus to that of Johnson's book of 1977, Namibia's Liberation Struggle: A Two-edged Sword, edited by two Canada-based academics, Colin Leys and John Saul, and published by James Currey in London and Ohio University Press in the US, did not appear until 1995, 18 years later - and confirmed Johnson's research and judgement in every syllable. If his integrity as an observer of southern African conditions needed validation, his reporting of Nujoma's purge of Swapo in 1976 provides it.
A terrible statistic
One further point could be added to Johnson's analysis of the rule of Thabo Mbeki. The report on employment scenarios to 2024 by the Human Sciences Research Council, published in August, provides a terrible statistic. It reports a recent study which discovered that about 33 percent of black women in South Africa between the ages of 25 and 29 were found to be infected with HIV, while about a quarter of black women aged between 30 and 34 were found to be so infected. (p.13) Now, a woman aged 34 in 2006 would have been born in 1972 and would have reached the age of 16 in 1988. A woman aged 25 in 2006 would have been born in 1981 and reached the age of 16 in 1997. There has been a terrible worsening in the rate of infection of women between the Mandela and Mbeki presidencies.
