After more than a century of German and then South African rule, and a 23-year armed independence struggle led by SWAPO, Namibia celebrated independence at a midnight ceremony in Windhoek attended by dozens of world leaders, including South Africa's F.W. de Klerk and UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar. Sam Nujoma took the oath as the country's first president.
Namibia's path to independence was one of the longest and most convoluted decolonization stories of the twentieth century. Germany had colonized the territory in the 1880s and carried out a genocide against the Herero and Nama peoples between 1904 and 1908. After World War I, South Africa administered the territory under a League of Nations mandate and then simply refused to relinquish it, defying decades of UN resolutions calling the occupation illegal.
SWAPO, the South West Africa People's Organisation, launched an armed struggle in 1966 that dragged on for 23 years, intertwined with the broader regional conflict involving Cuban troops, Angola, and apartheid South Africa's military. Only after the 1988 tripartite accords, brokered partly through Cold War diplomacy as the Soviet Union wound down its African commitments, did South Africa agree to a UN-supervised transition.
At the stroke of midnight on March 21, 1990, the old colonial flag came down and Namibia's new flag rose over Windhoek's stadium as fireworks lit the sky. Sam Nujoma, the guerrilla leader who had spent decades in exile, was sworn in as president. It was one of the last African territories to shed colonial rule, closing out a chapter of the continent's twentieth-century history.