Africa by Guy Arnold

Author:Guy Arnold [Arnold, Guy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY - TWO

Namibia

From the viewpoint of an increasingly embattled South Africa, Namibia occupied a strategically vital position as a buffer between the Republic and Angola and Zambia to its north. Covering 318,000 square miles of territory Namibia was half as large again as France with a population of just on one million people. Its thousand-mile northern border stretched from the Atlantic along the whole of southern Angola and then western Zambia for the 300 miles of the Caprivi Strip to the Kazungula ferry crossing from Zambia to Botswana at the point where the four countries – Namibia, Zambia, Rhodesia and Botswana – meet. The Caprivi Strip is a geographical anomaly, carved out of northern Bechuanaland in 1890 by the British and ceded to Germany so as to give German South West Africa access to the Zambezi; by the 1970s, when confrontation between South Africa and its northern neighbours was steadily escalating, the Strip enabled South Africa and Rhodesia jointly to encircle Botswana while the huge military base that South Africa established at Katima Mulilo on the Strip acted as a direct threat to Zambia. The Namibian economy could be conveniently divided into two sectors: the south, which was the area of white settlement (including segregated reserve areas for Africans), was the principal area of economic activity and included the territory’s huge mining wealth; and the north, where the majority of the African population lived, which was almost entirely dependent upon subsistence agriculture.

In Namibia South Africa behaved like any other colonial power and was to hold on to its colony for as long as it was able to do so, in the process denying all demands for majority rule. In addition, the colonial grip that Pretoria exercised over Namibia was reinforced by the apartheid policies that South Africa imposed at a time when these policies were coming under increasing pressure from the rest of the world community, led by the United Nations. As long as South Africa defied world opinion and refused to leave Namibia it was, in a sense, asserting its determination to remain outside the world community. If it was right to apply apartheid inside South Africa then Pretoria could not do less than apply it to Namibia. As a result, by the 1970s South Africa was in defiance of world opinion as represented by the United Nations by holding on illegally to its ‘mandate’ from the former League of Nations while refusing to move the territory towards independence as all the other former mandatory powers had agreed to do. Namibia’s rejection of South African occupation was expressed in 1968 by Andimba Toivo ja Toivo, SWAPO’s co-founder and the regional secretary for Ovamboland, in a statement he made from the dock on being sentenced to 20 years prison by a South African court under the retroactively applied Terrorism Act:

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