The first president of Namibia, Sam Nujoma, who has died aged 95, was one of the original liberation leaders who fought against the colonial project of southern Africa and, in particular, the racist apartheid regime of South Africa that had ruled his country since the end of the first world war.
Nujoma may not have been as great as Nelson Mandela in any moral sense, nor as Robert Mugabe in terms of the militarised conduct of liberation. However, he had none of the advantages of those two, whose countries both had a literate and educated population, and an – even if discriminatory – infrastructure that could be adapted for liberation.
