Episode 6 - The Battle of Omugulugwombashe ushers in the formal period of the armed struggle in South West

The concerted campaign against South Africa’s mandate to run South West Africa began in 1960 with the shock of both the Sharpeville Massacre and the Old Location massacre in Windhoek sealing Pretoria’s fate. All armed movements have their trigger moment and these two triggered the ANC in the first instance, and SWAPO in the second. In both cases, the South African Police were involved and protestors were shot in the back in a kind of bloodlust that was very difficult to explain away as the protestors were unarmed. All sorts of excuses have been trotted out by the usual suspects regarding these two incidents but the reality is they radicalised an already angry people. Later SWAPO said the Old Location shooting did not lead to the overwhelming support for their struggle they believed would follow diplomatically. Far worse things were going on nearby such as the Congo rebellion with its tales of brutality at a time of heightened tension during the Cold War. As Willem Steenkamp writes in his seminal work on this story, the South African Border War 1957 to 1989, the UN simply denounced South African and life continued as before. The Americans in particular would have sytmied further security council action anyway and it was naïve of SWAPO leadership to imagine that allies in this war would simply step aside over bad public relations – as vicious as these two shootings were. Liberia and Ethiopia were the only black members of the old League of Nations prior to the UN went to the World Court to charge South Africa with a breach of mandate at this time. SWAPO leader Sam Nujoma then fled abroad and continued mobilising both military and political support in exile.