Word: namibia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...idea of my father as a Thomas Jefferson thrilled us, though the only concrete detail we had on Namibia was a number--9500 miles from New York. Later, we gained enough political acumen to be fired with admiration and idealism over the client...
Western observers have tended to see, in these cycles of near accords and last-minute stipulations, parallels to almost any global situation they choose. South African strikes into Angola to forestall SWAPO have been likened to Israeli incursions into Beirut. Some see South Africa's approach in Namibia as a hint of future internal strategy...
...LOOKER SEES what he brings to it, but my family numbers among a bare handful of observers who, eight years ago, briefly saw in 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...
...amethyst miner had made the initial contact with my father's firm, putting his friend, the chief, in touch with his New York attorneys. Over the next few years my father made five month-long trips to Namibia, working on drafts of the new constitution. Once, they had to stop the talks for a week because the organizers didn't want a white American in the room...
...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...