The Namibia Spectator/SWAPO Meet

...There, the green, blue, and red flag of SWAPO floated over every house, and the kids playing in the streets wore SWAPO T-shirts...

...expense...

...Like many of Namibia's 1.3 million inhabitants, they are dominated by the Ovambo, whose homeland stretches far across the northern border into Angola...

...Although SWAPO had taken some of the precincts where Ovambo miners and workers were numerous enough to make a difference, outside Ovambo- land fewer than a third of the voters supported SWAPO, while nearly half supported DTA...

...DTA sup- porters, meanwhile, distributed ridicu- lous pseudo-SWAPO pamphlets con- taining obvious disinformation and played other collegiate-level dirty tricks, while SWAPO elements lived up to their reputation by intimidating whole neighborhoods of voters...

...Most outside observers thought that swAPo's 20-year guerrilla war fought against South Africa would have won the hearts and minds of 80 to 90 percent of the Namibians...

...I wasn't the only person who went to Namibia for the elections...

...SWAPO represents the interests of the majority Ovambo tribe, but it has global fame and its own bulky politburo...

...For its part, UNTAG strove earnestly to con- duct a reasonably fair election, though U.N...

...FT he election returns were announced with unexpected speed...

...Nujoma left the ral- ly in a huff, but the supporters of SWAPO'S arch-rival party, the DTA, were overjoyed, and staged an im- promptu rally of their own to celebrate their enemy's embarrassment and their relief...

...OPO's name was changed to the South West Africa Peoples Organization when it became apparent that OPO might indeed win independence for Ovamboland—a relatively fertile but impoverished and entirely overpopulated district—but lose the rest of South West Africa, which is arid (the Kalahari and Namib deserts conspire to relieve much of the country of vegetation) but rich in uranium and diamonds and severely underpopulated...

...Assistant Secretary of State Chester A. Crocker that swapped independence for Namibia for the removal of Cubans from Angola...

...There are perhaps as many as 750,000 Ovambo in Namibia at any one time—maybe more during elections—and they are feared and mistrusted by the other tribes...

...Nujoma...

...Once, the Ovambo fought to gain tribal independence under the banner of the Ovambo People's Organization (OPO), the group...

...By the night of November 13, all the districts south of Ovamboland had reported...

...By the time voting ended on November 11, more than 90 percent of the eligible voters had cast their ballots...

...More than 1,500 journalists showed up, joining the 7,500 members of the United Nations Transition Assistance Group (uNTAG) sent to monitor the voting, most of which was taking place at U.S...

...Splinter parties picked up the rest...

...The Hereros do not have that problem...

...vehicles drove up and down the Kaiserstrasse honking their horns and giving the clenched-fist SWAPO salute, It was also enough to give Sam Nujoma an opportunity to say at a postelection press conference that he would not oppose the establishment of a one-party state...

...fter all, Namibia's recent history has followed the trite pattern established by other African nations, where colonial governments, faced.with the inevitability of change but still unwilling to permit the growth and development of moderate political organizations, created power vacuums that were quickly filled by not-so-moderate paramilitary organizations...

...That local landslide was sufficient to give SWAPO a 57 percent majority in the country as a whole and a leading role in the 72-seat constituent assembly charged with writing the constitution for an independent Namibia...

...Dave Clark Five T went to Namibia for the elections there, to see what they had been calling the last colony in Africa dance the twist of freedom...

...Nujoma had alienated many Namibians with his torture-and-murder camps—he once had his own wife violently inter- rogated—and with his neo-Kampu- chean disgust at Namibians who had been given non-swAPo educations at schools and colleges...

...At best, the whole episode brought Namibia a Warhol-sized chunk of celebrity...

...During the entire history of the struggle, however, despite enthusiastic support from the U.N...

...Part of the U.N.'s charm, of course, is that it can't tell a Herero from a sole and authentic representative of Hereros...

...In the southern and central districts, the cam-paign had a festive air, but the farther north I traveled, the more intense and serious the issue of a SWAPO victory became...

...The election pitted the South West Africa People's Organization, or SWAPO, against the Democratic Turnhalle Alliance (DTA), a multiracial amalgam of anti-apartheid, moderate parties representing tribes ranging from the country's 75,000 whites to the much more numerous Kavangos and Bushmen...

...Namibia, much of which looks like the set of Dune, is a sparsely populated former colony that Germany lost to South Africa in the First World War, and that South Africa lost in the linked agreement put together by former U.S...

...the organization has been called by the U.N...

...the sole and authentic representatives" of the Namibian people—a suggestion that has caused some distress not only to the whites, but also to the Herero, Nama, Bushmen, Damara, Kavango, Caprivians, Tswana, and other tribes who also call Namibia Denis Boyles is the author of African Lives (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) and Man Eaters Motel, an anecdotal history of East Africa forthcoming from Grove Weidenfeld...

...A drive through the settlements oc- cupied by Ovambo workers told a dif- ferent story...

...they fomented violent opposition as a matter of policy, and when the move- ment toward decolonization finally reached its apex in each colony, those creating the most disruptive mischief had to be seen as the logical inheritors of power...

...The SWAPO victory was impressive enough to warrant a noisy celebration in the streets of Windhoek, where SWAPO supporters and UNTAG workers in U.N...

...In Ovamboland, the figure was very close to 100 percent...

...In fact, the secretary general of the Organization of African Unity, Salim Ahmed Salim, a Tanzanian, arrived in Windhoek ten days before the voting was scheduled to start and threatened that the OAU would consider invalid `'or at least questionable"—any election not won by SWAPO...

...I got a good sense of SWAPO's limited appeal when I followed the campaign from the dry, volcanic des- erts in the south to the grassy plains of the north...

...Rumors began filtering into the capital that SWAPO would revert to warfare if it lost the election...

...The next morning, the Ovambo districts came in: SWAPO had taken nearly 200,000 votes in Ovamboland, while the DTA had taken exactly 9,000...

...48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1990...

...In Keetmanshoop, a south- central farming community, SWAPO predicted 25,000 would show up for a Nujoma-led rally, but the only spec- tators were the three or four thousand Ovambo regulars that were customari- ly transported around the country on behalf of SWAPO...

...workers later told me that none of their security precautions were ultimately effective...

...that catapulted SWAPO's Com- munist leader, Sam Nujoma, to prominence...

...It was from their northern bases that SWAPO was able to direct most of the guerrilla warfare that only ended last spring, after Nujoma had tried to ac- celerate the democratic process by send- ing thousands of armed troops over the border from Angola...

...home...

...Throughout subSaharan Africa, these tribal-based groups were usually characterized as "nationalist" groups, since few outside Africa can distinguish the members of one tribe from another...

...Further, these groups were often led by a charismatic figure, such as SWAPO'S Mr...

...After all, when the territory was called South West Africa, everybody could guess where the place was, but now that it's plain Namibia, it has slipped off the edge of cognitive geography and lies someplace in the mist...

...and from sympathizers abroad, SWAPO had little influence outside its own tribal area except where Ovambo miners and agricultural workers were able to create satellite constituencies...