Sam Nujoma
Sam Nujoma spent thirty years in exile running a guerrilla war and then fifteen as president of the country it produced. He was a railway sweeper and then a clerk in Windhoek when he helped found the movement that became SWAPO in 1960, and he left the country the same year to petition the United Nations. South Africa had governed South West Africa under a League of Nations mandate since taking it from Germany in 1915, and had extended apartheid to it while refusing to place it under UN trusteeship. The armed struggle began in 1966, the year the General Assembly revoked the mandate. It was fought from Zambia and then Angola for twenty-three years, and it drew in the Cuban expeditionary force and the South African army; the battle at Cuito Cuanavale in 1987 and 1988 is generally taken as the point at which Pretoria concluded the position was not holdable. Namibia became independent in 1990 under a constitution written before the election, with a bill of rights, an independent judiciary and a two-term limit. He kept most of it. There was no expropriation and no settling of accounts with the white farming population, and the reconciliation policy held. The inheritance was a colonial economy almost intact. Namibia had, and has, among the widest income gaps measured anywhere, with the commercial farmland and the diamond and uranium mines still largely in the hands they were in before 1990. The willing-buyer land reform he chose has moved very little of it. The exception was the term limit, which parliament amended once for him personally before he stood down in 2005. He had also run SWAPO's camps in Angola, where suspected spies were detained and tortured in the 1980s - a record the party has never fully accounted for.
- Lived: 1929 CE – 2025 CE
- Nationality: Namibian
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
