His father, Daniel Utoni Nujoma, and his mom, Mpingana-Helvi Kondombolo, labored the land. As a boy, Mr. Nujoma stated in his memoir, he tended the household cattle and goats, carrying a child on his again to free his mom to work within the fields.
With solely modest formal schooling, Mr. Nujoma moved at age 17 to the coastal enclave of Walvis Bay, the place he labored at a normal retailer and a whaling station earlier than relocating to Windhoek as a cleaner on the railroad system. After hours, he studied English at evening faculty. In 1956, he married Theopoldine Kovambo Katjimne. They’d three sons, and a daughter who died at 18 months. Mr. Nujoma was in exile by then and unable to attend her funeral, he wrote, as a result of the police would have arrested him.
Within the late Fifties, as Ghana’s independence from Britain in 1957 turned an emblem of liberation for a lot of Africans, Mr. Nujoma was related to organizations that have been forerunners of SWAPO, notably the Ovamboland Folks’s Group. He left for exile in 1960 over his function in protests in opposition to the pressured removing of Black folks from one segregated township to a different. In 1966, his group launched the primary tentative navy operations of its armed battle. Through the years, hundreds of younger Namibians joined the insurgents’ ranks.
South Africa sought to belittle its battle with SWAPO as a low-intensity battle, however that belied its rising dedication of navy forces. “Regardless of main efforts by South Africa over 20 years,” Bernard E. Trainor, a navy correspondent for The New York Occasions, wrote in July, 1988, “the Namibian rebels’ power, now estimated at 8,000, seems undiminished.”
SWAPO’s navy traditions endured after independence when Namibia’s common military was deployed in help of the Congolese president, Laurent Kabila, in 1998 and to place down a secessionist revolt within the northeastern Caprivi Strip in 1999.
