Word: namibia
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...wrote a 19th century Swedish explorer about a land that threatens to become the scene of Africa's next bitter conflict: Namibia. With its 1,000-mile, surf-attacked Atlantic Ocean coastline and its seemingly endless expanses of desert, Namibia (also known as South West Africa) is startlingly beautiful-a virgin land the size of Texas and Louisiana, with a population of only 900,000. More important, it is one of the richest corners of Africa, possessing vast and largely untapped treasures of diamonds, copper, and other minerals. At Rossing, near the deep-water port of Walvis...
Halfway between a colonial past and an uncertain political future, Namibia is already a stricken land, threatened by an incipient civil war that has begun to tear it apart. Last week, even as the U.N. Security Council debated a proposal by its five Western members (the U.S., Britain, France, West Germany and Canada) for a political solution to Namibia's problems, thousands of members of the territory's Herero tribe gathered to pay tribute to their fallen leader, Chief Clemens Kapuuo, who had been slain by his political enemies. He was no ordinary tribal elder but the head...
...Kapuuo was shot to death in Windhoek late last month by two men who vanished without a trace. The Hereros believe that he was murdered by SWAPO (South West African People's Organization), the Marxist-oriented guerrilla movement whose political base is the 430,000-member Ovambo tribe, Namibia's largest ethnic group. (Second largest are the whites, with 100,000, followed by the Hereros with about 60,000.) Headed by bearded Militant Sam Nujoma, SWAPO has an estimated 4,000 guerrillas, most of them based in southern Angola, who have been carrying out an intermittent campaign...
Another sore point for the South Africans is Namibia. Carter referred to South Africa's intransigence in his Lagos speech, but failed to mention that the Marxist SWAPO (South West African People's Organization) has also rejected a settlement plan put forward by five Western powers. Carter only regretted, and did not condemn, the cold-blooded murder of Herero Chief Clemens Kapuuo, who almost certainly was the victim of a SWAPO assassination campaign directed against moderate black Namibians. One famous South African, Heart Surgeon Christiaan Barnard, charges that Washington refuses to accept admittedly imperfect internal settlements in Namibia...
...sides sought to reap political advantage from the assassination. South African officials charged that SWAPO had killed the black leader as part of an assassination campaign, and alluded to a "captured document" that purportedly included plans to kill opposition black leaders in Namibia. In Zambia last week, SWAPO Leader Sam Nujoma, who at one time studied English under Kapuuo, denied that his organization had had anything to do with the killing. The murder, he suggested, might well have been the work of South African provocateurs...