Namibian Independence
Namibia became independent on 21 March 1990, having been governed by South Africa for seventy-five years without any legal right to do so after 1966. The territory was German South West Africa from 1884, and the German administration's suppression of the Herero and Nama revolt between 1904 and 1908 — extermination orders, driving survivors into the Omaheke desert, camps on Shark Island — killed perhaps eighty per cent of the Herero and half the Nama, and is generally described as the first genocide of the twentieth century. South Africa took it in 1915 and held it under a League of Nations mandate, then simply carried on after the League died, extending its own racial legislation and refusing to place the territory under United Nations trusteeship. The General Assembly revoked the mandate in 1966 and the International Court confirmed the occupation was illegal in 1971. SWAPO began an armed campaign the same year the mandate was revoked, operating from Zambia and later Angola, and the war became entangled with the Angolan civil war and with Cuban troops there. The settlement came out of that entanglement. The stalemate around Cuito Cuanavale in 1988 and the wider diplomatic shift produced a linked agreement: Cuban withdrawal from Angola, South African withdrawal from Namibia, and United Nations-supervised elections. SWAPO won them, Sam Nujoma became president, and the constitution written then included an unusually strong bill of rights and abolished the death penalty. Germany acknowledged the genocide in 2021. The country it inherited is enormous, dry and empty — the second least densely populated on earth — with diamonds and uranium, and one of the most unequal distributions of land and income anywhere. SWAPO has won every election since.
- Year: 1990 CE
- Category: Political
