WE WERE able to respond with facts about their suppression of the people of South West Africa. In every argument, when they attempted to convince us that South Africa was ruling South West Africa under the League of Nations mandate, we countered them again with facts.
I threw all their books back, which they earlier gave to us to read, saying: “No indigenous person in South West Africa participated in this agreement. It was all done without the consent of our people and was purely you white men’s ideas of a different way of colonising South West Africa. Take your books back.”
We did not tell them that we had come back to challenge what South Africa had said at the World Court but just that we had left the country and could come back to our country any time we wanted. One of them asked me, “And what happened to your uncle Nkrumah?”
Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah had been overthrown on 24 February 1966, only a month earlier, and had gone into exile in Guinea. I quickly countered him with, “What happened to your uncle Verwoerd?” Verwoerd had survived an assassination attempt in April 1960 when he was shot twice in the head by David Platt, a white farmer. I added, “That too can happen in political life.” I could see that the Boer had become angry, but then he remained silent. As it turned out, just a few months later on 6 September 1966, a second assassination attempt on Verwoerd was successful when he was stabbed to death in Cape Town by Dometrio Tjafenda, a parliamentary messenger.
When we were being interrogated at the police station, I had some South African rands and I sent one of the policemen to the Grand Hotel opposite the CID Headquarters to buy some soft drinks for us and bring them unopened, and some assorted biscuits. They said: “You don’t trust us?” I replied, “How can I trust an oppressor? You are oppressing us. You are killing our people here.” We drank the drinks and shared the biscuits with some of the policemen.
Later on, they realised we were not ready to co-operate and they took our belongings and locked us in a cell at the Windhoek police station. I was extremely tired. The previous day I had made the flight to Kenya to try and make the connection to Lusaka via Entebbe, then back to Dar-es-Salaam, and then the eight-hour flight to Lusaka, and then the truck journey to Livingstone. Finally, early on the morning of 20 March we had taken the flight to Windhoek. I slept deeply.
The Boers came back at 1 a.m. They had apparently been constantly in touch with then Prime Minister Verwoerd in Pretoria, telling him that I was not co-operating and that they considered me highly dangerous, and if allowed to go free in the country I could influence the population to rise in opposition against the minority white occupation of South West Africa, which would result in a pro-South West African indigenous decision in the International Court of Justice.
They told Pohamba, “Tomorrow you will have to go back where you came from.” Pohamba tried to wake me to tell me what they had said, but I was still asleep. He told me later that they had tried to exhaust us by banging doors and turning the lights on and off, but I slept through it all. At 5 a.m. they came again, bringing our belongings, including my typewriter, and said, “Get dressed. You are going back where you came from.” It appeared that the same evening they had been looking for the pilot. He had not taken off that same day and had spent the night in Windhoek. They found him and threatened to arrest him and impound the aircraft unless he agreed to take us back. He was technically under arrest, so he had to agree to fly us back to Zambia.
Eventually Pohamba woke us, saying, “It seems they are serious, they have brought our belongings.” I got up and dressed but refused to leave willingly. We said, “This is our country we will not go.” There were six policemen armed with sub-machine guns. They forced us into separate cars, each sitting in the back with an armed policeman on either side. We drove along Leutwein Street, passing the big German church and through Klein Windhoek on to the airport road. I was driven past the Administrator’s house as a prisoner being deported from my own country. Now I live in that same house, the State House, as the first President of the Republic of Namibia. It was March 21 again, 24 years later in 1990, when we celebrated our independence, and declared March 21 our national day, Namibia Independence Day.
At the airport we sang some freedom songs. There were black workers around who observed closely what was happening. I refused to eat food that was offered by the pilot, though the drinks and biscuits the evening before were all the sustenance we had while in the Windhoek police station for those 16 hours.
At 6 a.m., the plane took off for Livingstone. The pilot was friendly, despite what he himself had gone through. We flew over Chobe and I sat with him, looking down at the thousands upon thousands of buffalo, wildebeest and other game. He was a South African working in Bechuanaland, which was only a few months away from its independence as the Republic of Botswana.
In Livingstone the next day, I held a press conference and told my story. It gave the lie to the South African claim that we were self-exiled and could return whenever we wished. In England, at Oxford University, an international conference had been organised to shed light on South African apartheid policies and to highlight the responsibility of the international community. This was timed with the closing months of the World Court hearings, and we were well represented at the Conference by Comrades Hage Geingob, Peter Nanyemba and others.
The sponsors were the presidents or prime ministers of a number of African, Asian and Caribbean countries, and the chairman was Olof Palme, who was at that time Minister of Communication in the Swedish Government. I flew on to London in time to make a statement, as the conference was closing, on my attempt to return home. That attempt and the Oxford Conference, on top of the sustained efforts of many people, all added to our expectations that the World Court would deliver a judgment that would make it possible to bring an end to South Africa’s continued colonial administration of our country.
The World Court hearing had gone on since November 1960 and was the longest in its history. Many people and many governments were deeply concerned that it should deliver a judgment that would uphold the authority of the United Nations. For us it was a matter of getting our country back. We had seen enough of the United Nations to know that we could not depend on it alone to bring about our freedom. We knew we had to be ready to fight for our country’s independence.
When I was at Windhoek police station in March 1966, the first group of our freedom fighters were already at Omugulu-gOmbashe in the Uuakualuudhi district, preparing to mobilise and train people. Verwoerd and the CID no doubt knew this, but had not yet found them. Had they already done so when they held Comrade Pohamba and myself in the police cells, they would certainly not have sent us back to continue with the struggle abroad. And when, during the hours of interrogation I was storming at the police, “You are killing our people!” a leading SWAPO activist, Leo Shoopala, had just been shot dead by Jack Ashipala, one of the Boer’s puppets in Uukuambi, northern Namibia. My flight to Windhoek had come just before we reached a turning point, which was to redirect the history of the struggle for the liberation of Namibia.