The War for Namibia

230 Pages·2010·17.12 MB·English

Deearein 6 onein

The Devils
Haremm
\I
The War for Namibia
Zed Books Ltd
London and New lersey
The Devils are Among Us - The War for Namibia
was first published by Zed Books Ltd, 57 Caledonian Road.
London NI 9BU. UK and 171 First Avenue, Atlantic Highlands.
New Jersey 07716, USA. in 1989.
Copyright © Namibia Communications Centre. 1989.
Cover designed by Andrew Corbett,
Photographs John Liebenberg and John Evenson/NCCT.
Typeset by EMS Photosetters, Rochford, Essex.
Printed and bound in the United Kingdom
at Bookcraft (Bath) Ltd, Midsomer Norton.
All rights reserved.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Herbstein. Denis.
The devils are among us: the war for Namibia.
1. Namibia.
1. Title. TI. Evenson. John.
968.8'03.
ISBN 0-86232-896-9
ISBN 0-86232-897-7 pbk
Contents
Acknowledgements v
Preface vi
Maps x
1. 'Give us back a dwelling place' - Namibia 1945-80 1
Political Organization 3
SWANU 6
SWAPO is Born 8
Exile 11
Armed Struggle 14
The Pretoria Trial 16
Courts, Churches, Unions and Chiefs 19
The Coup in Portugal 23
War in Angola 26
The Gang of Five 29
2. Partners in Liberation: SWAPO and the Churches 34
Divide and Rule 37
The Guerrillas 40
Total Onslaught 45
The Rough and the Smooth 47
The Churches 50
Exilitis 58
3. The Crowbar 61
'Sterk' Hans Dreyer 64
Namibianization of the War 69
Extermination 73
The Law 79
Information Gathering 82
Jonas Paulus 87
Death in Kavango 89
What Did Koevoet Achieve? 93
4. Life in the War Zone 96
Behind the White Wire 98
How 'The Other Half' Lived 100
The Women's Lot 104
Dusk to Dawn 106
'Ombili, ihena shili, otai twala, kombila' 110
Junior Revolutionaries 116
A Healthy Body 121
5. Namibia Inc. 125
Albion Commercial 125
South Africa's Vassal 132
Arms and Trade 133
Empty Notebook, Silent Camera 143
Dirty Tricks 146
6. The Deceitful Decade 150
Human Rights to Cold War 150
Low Diplomacy 153
The Puppets Can't Dance 159
Cuito Cuanavale to New York 170
Why South Africa Had to Go 175
Freedom Road? 178
After They Have Gone 183
Bibliography 185
Glossary 189
Index 191
Acknowledgements
We acknowledge the contribution of Michael and Priscilla Hishikushitja,
Andreas Amushila, Justin Ellis, Brian Wood, the Rev. Hidipo
Shanyengange, Derek Forbes, John Dugard, who have provided
information or commented on written material. At the London offices
of the Namibia Communications Centre our work has been greatly
facilitated by Hilifa Mbako, Protasius Ndauendapo and Christine
Plezia. We also owe a debt to the skilful and often courageous advice
offered by two lawyers in Namibia, David Smuts and Hartmut Ruppel.
At Zed Books, John Daniel and Anne Rodford have been patient and
constructive.
Others have reported their experiences or offered insights from inside
the war zone, but we feel it is still premature to mention them by name.
August 1989
Preface
This book has been written in Britain by two journalists whose names on
the South African government blacklist have prevented them from
working in Namibia. While we might have missed the atmosphere, the
human contacts and visual insights vital to a reporter, there are
compensating factors in doing an 'outside job'. The story of the war
would have been impossible to ascertain under the rigorous conditions
of censorship. The facts are more freely retold abroad. However, we
make no claims to be presenting the definitive story of the struggle for
liberation. That will follow when independence and peace - and access
to the archives - are granted to this tragic land.
The Namibia Communications Centre was established in 1984 as an
ecumenical news agency to publicise the struggle of the churches and the
people of Africa's last colony. The world formally favoured Namibian
independence, yet the realization of the goal seemed as distant as ever.
Hardly any news came out of the country, and what did was selected and
fashioned by the mind of the South African military. The Centre quickly
established a territorial network of church-based amateur and
professional stringers able to supply news for transmission around the
world. The offices in central London became a meeting place for
Namibians living in Britain, and a stopping-off point for the churchmen
and women, students, politicians, freedom fighters to-ing and fro-ing
between southern Africa and the outside world. What we heard from
our *spies' inside the territory, and Namibian visitors to London, forms
much of the marerial in this book.
Namibia is unique in the 20th century not for its experience of
genocide, for there are the Armenians and Jews and Cambodians; nor
for the apartheid shared with blacks in South Africa; nor are they a
people starved of a motherland, as are the Kurds or Palestinians; while
Eritreans would even dispute the territory's claim to being Africa's last
colony. What makes it different is being the last surviving League of
Nations mandate administered as a 'sacred trust of civilization'. This
Preface
status was unique in international diplomacy for not placing its faith in
the good government of subject peoples, but in providing safeguards
towards the fulfilment of that aim. It is one of the ironies of the century
that the country given the most solid protection under international law
should suffer the more for it.
In the scramble for Africa, Europe's undignified carve-up of the'dark
continent', imperial Germany gained Namibia. The German emperor
proclaimed a 'protectorate' over its people. In the exercise of this
'protection', his representatives signed treaties with local chiefs which
the Germans usually did not honour, but when blacks deviated from the
'contract' they were punished by armed poss6s, their land seized, yet
more onerous treaties imposed. When the Hereros saw that their grazing
lands would soon all be stolen, they launched a war of resistance.
A well-trumpeted justification for German protection was to bring
peace between Namas and Hereros, who had skirmished over land for a
quarter of a century, usually with guns supplied by Afrikaner traders,
and on at least one occasion by a German missionary. But joint
resistance was not yet possible. In planning the insurrection, the Herero
supreme chief, Samuel Maharero, wrote his 'let us die fighting' letter to
Hendrik Witbooi of the Namas.
All our obedience and patience with the Germans is of little avail, for
each day they shoot someone dead for no reason at all. Hence I
appeal to you, my Brother, not to hold aloof from the uprising, but to
make your voice heard so that all Africa may take up arms against the
Germans. Let us die fighting rather than die as a result of
maltreatment, imprisonment or some other calamity. Tell all the
kapteins [chiefs] down there to rise and do battle. [Drechsler 1980,
p. 143.]
Maharero asked Hermanus van Wyk, kaptein of the Basters (of Nama
and European descent) to deliver the letter to Witbooi. It never arrived.
Van Wyk handed it to the Germans. Even so, it is doubtful whether the
appeal would have induced Witbooi to change his mind at that stage.
Governor Theodor Leutwein later admitted he had been saved from
'disaster' at the beginning of the uprising because Herero and Nama
were kept from joining forces for nine months, until October 1904.
Divide and rule tactics in which real or imagined differences were played
upon by their rulers became a hallmark of the colonial and South
African style of government, with serious consequences for Namibia's
liberation struggle.
The second lesson which Namibians might have learnt at this early
stage was the poisonous power of Western propaganda. In matters of
warfare and culture, Germany was perhaps the most advanced
Preface
civilization the world had seen, though lagging behind the USA, France
or Britain in democratic institutions. Yet the German conduct of the war
in no way matched that of its 'uncivilized' enemy. Compare the two
battle commands. The extermination order of General Lother von
Trotha, the German commander-in-chief, issued after the defeat of the
Hereros at Hamakari:
The Herero people will have to leave the country. Otherwise I shall
force them to do so by means of guns. Within the German
boundaries, every Herero, whether found armed or unarmed, with or
without cattle, will be shot. I shall not accept any more women and
children. I shall drive them back to their people - otherwise I shall
order shots to be fired at them. These are my words to the Herero
people. Signed: the Great General of the Mighty Kaiser, von Trotha.
Von Trotha was not quite true to his word. By the end of 1905, some
16,000 of the original Herero population of between 60,000 and 80,000
were still alive, but 14,000 of these were in concentration camps, their
land and cattle seized. The Namas suffered almost as badly. By 1911
they were reduced to fewer than 10,000, having lost one-third to a half of
their numbers.
In January 1904 Samuel Maharero issued his battle order.'In my
capacity as Supreme Chief of the Herero I hereby decree and resolve that
none of my people lay their hands upon the English, the Bastaards, the
Berg Damara, the Nama and the Boers.' Nor were German women and
children, unarmed German men or missionaries to be harmed. The
order preceded the Geneva Convention on the conduct of war by four
decades. Maherero was true to his word. After the war, a vengeful
German public craved just one case of a rapedDeutscheFrau,o r a child
murdered by blacks. Governor Leutwein was unable to oblige. Yet the
vision of barbarism survived, much as, three-quarters of a century later,
the SWAPO nationalists would be portrayed as "marxists' and
'terrorists'.
In World War One, South African troops occupied German South
West Africa in the name of the British king, and were rewarded with the
territory under a League of Nations mandate in 1920. General Jan
Smuts, one-time Boer leader and co-founder of the League, spoke of the
mandatory state looking upon its position as 'a great trust and honour,
not as an office of profit or a position of private advantage for its own
nationals'. (Du Pisani 1986, p. 1.) Yet that is exactly what it became. The
earnest debates before and during the Versailles peace conference, the
words of the Trust itself, point to an unprecedented caring for the
welfare of subject races and the new Union of South Africa undertook to
'promote to the utmost the material and moral well-being and the social
progress of the inhabitants.' It would abide by a group of specific