Word: kapuuo
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...Namibia another type of parallel--a Kennedy-esque Camelot dream that ended in ruin. Between 1975 and 1978, when the Democratic Turnhalle Alliance was trying to splice the various majority and minority rules into a constitution at a national convention, my father served as legal counsel to Clemens Kapuuo, president of the moderate delegation and chief of the Herero tribe which, back in 1951, had been responsible for the original U.N. petition...
...Clemens Kapuuo was then probably in his early forties. Soft-spoken and highly cultured, he stood nearly seven feet tall. His bodyguards were taller; the encourage filled our living room. He told stories of his 13 children and drank only orange juice. When he visited us in the States for the first time, he was en route to New York and Washington to try to persuade diplomats that, as moderates, the conventioneers represented Namibian opinion more accurately than SWAPO could. On that trip, Carter Administration officials refused to receive his party because SWAPO had been excluded from the constitutional conference...
...Kapuuo in person won us over completely. The visceral confidence that this was a good man, who once in power would stand a chance of knitting together a tattered country, caught us up in enthusiasm for Namibia's future. The constitution he and my father worked on held out similar hope. It chipped away at the problem of race representation by splitting the elected legislature into two cooperative branches--one "nationally representative" body elected by population, and one composed of an equal number of representatives from each of 11 ethnic groups, including Hereros, Ovambos, Afrikaners and so forth. Local authorities...
When the Turnhalle Alliance swept the elections under that constitution, Kapuuo as the president-elect, that hope seemed about to become a reality. We even talked about taking the long trip to Africa for his inauguration...
...KAPUUO WAS ASSASSINATED in March of 1978, about a month before the inauguration. He was shot outside the front door of a store he kept outside the capital city of Windhoek, and questions of national representation becme moot as crowds of his tribesmen and others marched and lamented and staged a massive ritual funeral. Rioting broke out at the funeral and seven Ovambo tribesmen were killed, the climax of weeks of Herero-Ovambo strife. SWAPO leaders denied any involvement, just as they had three years before when Ovambo chief Philemon Elifas was shot to death in a similar incident...