S. Africa Pledges to End Rule : Namibian Independence: Fear, Joy--and Suspicion

Hein van Heerden’s hands are caked with this land’s soil, his face browned by its sun, and every South African rand he has ever made is tied up in a chunk of rugged terrain stretching gloriously beyond his sight.

He feels safe, living behind 10-foot wire fences and carrying semi-automatic weapons to protect his family from the black rebels who could be hiding among the thick, prickly trees.

But what frightens Van Heerden and many other whites here is that this last colony in Africa may soon become an independent nation, ruled by the same guerrillas who have been planting land mines on farms and bombs in butcher shops.

“In my heart,” the rancher said, pausing to touch the left pocket of his khaki shirt, “I hope that day never breaks.”

About 300 miles south of here, though, in a church office in the capital of Windhoek, Danny Tjongarero, a black man about Van Heerden’s age, says his hopes for independence have been crushed so many times that he is afraid to hope any more.

“My gut feeling tells me it will happen, but my rational self tells me something different,” said Tjongarero, an executive officer in the South-West Africa People’s Organization. SWAPO, which has waged a guerrilla war against South Africa’s presence, would probably win an election here.

“It’s difficult to believe things are finally changing,” Tjongarero said.

After 73 years of South African rule, the past 22 of them blood-stained by an armed struggle for independence, the territory of South-West Africa, also known as Namibia, faces the prospect of nationhood and majority rule with fear, joy--and a good deal of suspicion about Pretoria’s sincerity after a decade of broken promises.

South Africa recently agreed, in peace talks with Angola and Cuba, to begin withdrawing its troops from Namibia on Nov. 1 and to allow free elections here by June 1. But in exchange, South Africa wants to approve a timetable for the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola, an issue that is on the table as those talks resume today.

Namibia, located between Angola and South Africa, is a formidable wilderness rich in uranium and diamonds. To the west, icy ocean waters from the South Pole crash against 500 miles of blistering desert known as the Skeleton Coast. Scrub trees cling for life to the dry hills inland and to the east is the gateway to the Kalahari Desert.

Twice California’s Size

Twice the size of California, Namibia has a population of only 1.2 million, with at least a dozen ethnic groups and 40 political parties.

A multiracial “transitional government,” appointed by South Africa’s president, presides over Namibia’s affairs, but South Africa can veto its actions. And no one from Namibia has been invited to the peace talks at which the country’s future is being decided.

“Namibia is just a ball in a Ping-Pong game,” Dirk Mudge, a white farmer and current chairman of the transitional government, said recently. “They’re hitting us from one side of the table to the other. Whether we’re going to like the outcome I don’t think is important to any of them.”

Handed Colony in 1915

Namibia has been an international pawn for decades. Germany handed the colony over to South Africa in 1915, and some of that heritage remains--one of the few German-language daily newspapers outside of Europe, for instance.

But these days Namibia carries the unmistakable mark of South Africa. Afrikaans, the primary language of the Dutch-descended whites who rule South Africa, is widely spoken. The territory uses the South African rand, carries a South African postal code and stocks its shelves with South African goods.

South African soldiers are everywhere as well. Together, the South African and fledgling South-West Africa Territory Forces have about 50,000 soldiers here. Convoys of armored cars, tanks and trucks carrying black Namibians and young white South Africans roar past the peasants in the parched countryside up north, braking for herds of mules and cows.

45,000 Cubans Deployed

From bases near Namibia’s northern border with Angola, South Africa is fighting SWAPO, which has its bases in southern Angola. Pretoria also has had several thousand troops stationed inside Angola, helping the U.S.-backed Angola rebel movement fight the Marxist government there. That is how Cuba came to be involved: Its government sent an estimated 45,000 troops to help Angola fight the rebels of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), supported by South Africa and the United States.

South Africa has promised to begin pulling its troops out of southern Angola, but the withdrawal is not yet apparent in northern Namibia, the most likely exit route. And although the prospects for Namibian independence have improved, the South African army’s presence in the north makes people disbelievers.

“People are still being killed, detained and arrested,” said Bishop Kleopas Dumeni, of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Oniipa. “We are fed up with these things. We are longing to see some action that will lead to independence.”

Oniipa is in Owambo, a populous province bordering Angola and crisscrossed by high wire fences, military barracks and air strips. About 60% of Namibia’s population lives in the province, in small metal shacks or grass huts surrounded by circular fences made of tree branches. Cattle graze on what little grass has survived three years of drought.

Center of Support

Owambo province is the center of SWAPO support in Namibia. Thousands of children in the area are boycotting classes, or have fled into Angola, to protest the proximity of South African bases to their schools. And many residents are regularly detained, without charge, by the authorities.

“We know that South Africa’s presence here is causing all this trouble,” said Oswald Shivute, secretary to Owambo’s black legislative assembly, which is part of the transitional government. “The people here want one man, one vote.”

Shivute works in a one-story office building surrounded by barbed wire, sandbagged guard towers and roadblocks, with the army’s 53rd Battalion and the provincial police next door. Two months ago, the police walked over and arrested him as he sat behind his desk. He was released a few days later, without charges or explanation, and returned to work.

Botha’s Request Denied

Many participants in the transitional government speak openly against Pretoria’s policies, even though their jobs would disappear if independence came. The government ministers in Windhoek recently refused South African President Pieter W. Botha’s request that they ban the political activities of SWAPO and crack down on the news media.

The specter of a SWAPO government frightens many of Namibia’s 80,000 whites, some of whom arrived here decades ago on the assumption that Pretoria’s white minority-led government would always protect their interests.

As owners of most of the farms and small businesses in central and southern parts of the territory, these whites now feel abandoned by South Africa, and they worry that a SWAPO government will run the country into the ground.

‘No Anchor on Open Sea’

“We’ll be left on the large, open sea without any anchor,” said Sarel Becker, leader of the right-wing Herstigte Nasionale Party. Becker, whose grandfather fought under the South African flag in the Anglo-Boer war, predicts that many of the whites will leave and the economy will fall apart.

“If SWAPO comes to power, we will not be sure of our property, and maybe not our lives,” Becker added.

Since rancher Van Heerden, 44, moved here from South Africa 13 years ago, he and his family have managed to overcome the threat of SWAPO attacks. The previous owner moved away after marrying a woman who had been widowed by a SWAPO land mine. But the Van Heerdens weren’t scared away.

They built up a herd of 675 cattle on 25,000 acres of ranchland. They trained their black farm workers to use guns and issued them rifles and cleared an area around the house to prevent guerrillas from hiding in the brush.

‘A Camouflaging Color’

What a lot of people don’t realize, he tells a visitor, “is that black is a camouflaging color.”

During the dry months--”infiltration season,” he calls it--Van Heerden’s black trackers follow him as he drives around his property, using tree branches to smooth the soft dirt so that later they’ll be able to tell whether SWAPO insurgents have been planting mines.

Now that they feel well-protected against rebel attack, the Van Heerdens and their neighbors are worried about the threat of a political change.

“The blacks around here are under the impression that if SWAPO gets in, this farm has already been allocated to someone, that vehicle is already allocated and these shops in town are already allocated,” Van Heerden said.

He said his black workers “think on independence day everything will be given to them. And if a couple of blokes come along and say this is their farm, what can you do about it? Nothing.”

No Plans to Seize Farms

SWAPO slogans are replete with the virtues of Marxism, but the group has been toning down its rhetoric. SWAPO leader Sam Nujumo, living in exile in Angola, said recently that SWAPO has no plans to seize white farms although it might nationalize “one or two” industries.

Tjongarero, the SWAPO official in Windhoek, has been giving seminars on the party’s plans for the country. He says his audiences, mostly white businessmen, “have been subjected to so much propaganda that they see the red (Communist) devil coming.”

“I start out by assuring them I’m not going to take someone’s Mercedes-Benz or their house,” Tjongarero said.

He also has to overcome concerns about safety after a long guerrilla war in which thousands of people, including civilians, have died. Namibia has had so many bloody bomb blasts that customers are patted down by security guards before entering many public shops, from a stationery shop in Windhoek to a roadside grocery store in the far northern town of Oshakati.

“We are starting from a minus point in trying to convince them we are not the cannibals they think we are,” Tjongarero said.

Most SWAPO officials say they are better prepared to run the country today than in 1978, when the United Nations adopted a resolution calling for free elections in an independent Namibia, a resolution that South Africa defied.

$150 in Annual Aid

They think they can make up for the $150 million in annual aid from South Africa, which accounts for about 20% of Namibia’s annual budget, by renegotiating contracts with mining companies, increasing international trade by escaping the sanctions imposed on South Africa and cutting their spending on defense.

“Whatever South Africa pumps into here is minuscule compared to what they’ve taken out,” said Anton Lubowski, a Windhoek lawyer and white member of SWAPO. “No one can tell me there must be so much poverty in a country with so many riches.”

On the riches of this country, even Van Heerden agrees. Walking outside his home in the long shadows of evening, he surveyed his property and smiled.

“This is beautiful ground,” he said. “If those blokes in the republic (South Africa) could see this, they’d all be moving here. It’s a great country.”