Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Sam Daniel Shafiishuna Nujoma was born on May 12, 1929 at Etunda in Ongandjera district in the north of Namibia. Growing up in a traditional Ovambo household, the young boy tended the family's livestock and fulfilled other domestic duties. It was not before he was ten years old that he began to obtain a formal education by attending a Finnish missionary school. According to Nujoma's own account, he generally seems to have experienced his childhood as relatively undisturbed by disruptive outside influences. This changed when he moved to Walvis Bay in 1946. There he was not only able to immerse himself into the harbor town's cosmopolitan environment, but he also witnessed the harsh realities of migrant contract labor while working at a general store and at a whaling station. In 1949 he relocated to Windhoek, where he worked as an office cleaner for the South African Railways and complemented his rudimentary education by attending evening classes. In 1956 he married Theopoldine Kovambo Katjimune, with whom he would have three surviving children.Windhoek exposed him even more unambiguously to the demeaning South African system of racial segregation. Conversely, his job with the railways also provided Nujoma with a degree of mobility, and he was able to visit Cape Town by 1955. Here he gained access to a wider world of communication networks and of political activists which alerted him ... log in or subscribe to read full text