Africa’s cranky Uncle Sam

Conscripts in the South African Defence Force of the 1980s used to sing a song about killing Sam Nujoma. Most of them probably knew little of who he was, having only vague impressions of a shadowy figure who, they were assured, posed a violent threat to a dry, white way of life.

Nujoma, who died last week at the age of 95, was the last of the leaders of the anticolonial struggle that arose in Africa in the 1950s. He, Samora Machel, Robert Mugabe and António Agostinho Neto became the faces — either loved or hated, depending on who was talking — of Southern Africa’s bitter, brutish and long liberation wars.

Nujoma’s war went on longer than those of the others as Angola, and thus Namibia — then known as South West Africa — became the last chess pieces of the Cold War.

The South West African People’s Organisation, which he led, won the elections that followed the end of the war hands down, and in 1990, a year after the guns fell silent, Nujoma became president of the last but one of Africa’s countries to embrace democracy.

While he urged reconciliation, Nujoma’s three terms were not without controversy. In 1992 he spent R75m on a presidential jet while asking Norway for famine relief, a decision that then Norwegian aid minister Grete Faremo called “regrettable”.

In 2001 he told university students that the country “does not allow homosexuality, lesbianism here. Police are ordered to arrest you, and deport you and imprison you too.”

And in 2009, he remarked to a gathering that whites “are poisonous like a mamba”, a not-so-oblique reminder that German schutztruppe had poisoned water wells during their 1904 campaign to drive the Herero from their land.

In the end, Samuel Shafiishuna Daniel Nujoma (Shafiishuna, which means lightning, was his combat name) died quietly in hospital in Windhoek after being ill “for a few weeks” — a statement that reveals as little about his last days as the old army ever admitted about South African soldiers dying in another war so far away it may as well have been on the moon.