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TransAfrica
2000

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Sierra Leone, 10 - 23 Oct,  2001

Vol 7 No 16

INDEX OF
BACK ISSUES

BOOK REVIEW

TITLE: NORWAY AND NATIONAL LIBERATION IN SOUTHERN AFRICA

(11/10/2001) Always operating behind the scene, cool Norway has since Southern Africans’ campaigns to liberate themselves from colonialism and apartheid have been working to bring freedom and peace to this region in Africa since the late 1950s onwards. This has come in the form of formulation of official policies and co-operation with various liberation movements in the field of humanitarian assistance.

Norway’s involvement and participation in southern Africa’s liberation functioned through churches, trade unions and solidarity movements. Norway and National Liberation in Southern Africa was conceived when South Africa’s official apartheid policy and regime demised, a demise that marked the end of long-running protracted struggle for national liberation in the entire Southern Africa region. In August 1994, the Uppsala-based Nordic Africa Institute commissioned a project to document and analyze the Nordic countries involvement in Southern Africa liberation struggles.

The material for this work came mainly from Norway’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs archives, beefed up with some primary sources. Norwegian relationship with Southern Africa dates back hundreds of years but this book looks at the origin of "special" relationship from 1960 to 1975. This is the period when Norway began to have "great changes" in its "political attitude towards Southern Africa." Two events marked this 15-year period: it is during this period that the Norwegian anti-apartheid movement was born to give dignity to the peoples of Southern Africa in their attempts to liberate themselves from the clutches of colonialism and apartheid and a bond was hatched between the Norwegian solidarity organizations and the official authorities in Norway. The result of all these was aid flowing to Southern African refugees and, as Tore Linne Eriksen, the editor of this volume who wrote chapter one, reveals, "victims of apartheid" developed into a regular and organized form of support and co-operation."

It wasn’t only the African National Congress and other liberation movements in South Africa that received support of all kinds from Oslo, Namibia’s liberation movement SWAPO, as Eva Helene Ostbye demonstrates in chapter two, too, got direct Norwegian support in their long struggle for freedom. All this came in a parliamentary resolution in 1973 carefully drafted to avoid conflicts with international law in Oslo’s support for liberation movements in Southern Africa. Said the 1973 legislation, "The peoples in dependent areas struggling to achieve national liberation" are to be recipients of support from Norway. Norway left out the words "South African liberation movements" to be on the safe side of international law with "regard to interference in the internal matters of independent countries." This restriction became the basis for Oslo’s support programme for Southern African liberation movements. Oslo’s assistance to SWAPO has long history, dating back to when Germany colonized Namibia in 1884 and visited one of the most brutal suppressions on local ethnic groups in Africa, especially the Heroro group, including massive plundering of their natural resources. To add salt to injury, South African occupation that followed in 1915 continued the evil schemes of the Germans.

Norway came to the aid of SWAPO when Pretoria disrespected United Nations decisions and the verdict of the international court in The Hague. As the Namibian liberation struggle against South Africa’s occupation intensified, so did Oslo’s support to SWAPO.

Though editor of this volume, Tore Linne Eriksen, associate professor of development studies at the Oslo University College and author of The Political Economy of Namibia and other books on global history, African studies and development co-operation, wrote three of the ten chapters and co-wrote chapter five with Anita Kristensen Krokan. The book has many case studies and deals with issues such as what fuel the apartheid war machine, how Norwegian churches helped the Southern African liberation struggle, how the Norwegian Confederation of Trade Unions supported South African trade union against apartheid and such pioneering local activism like the Namibian Association of Norway in boosting the moral of SWAPO and other local groups’ campaigns against Pretoria’s occupation.

No doubt the significance of Oslo’s support to Southern African liberation movements is captured by no ordinary person than F.W. de Klerk, former president of South Africa in his autobiography The Last Trek—A New Beginning. The Autobiography (1999). Wrote de Klerk, "The fact is that for four decades South Africa had been a central preoccupation of the Norwegians. Whole generations of Norwegians school children had been raised on the premise that apartheid was the apotheosis of all evil and that Nelson Mandela and the ANC could do no wrong. Norway was one of the main contributors to the ANC and one of its most vociferous supporters in international campaigns to isolate South Africa." This statement by de Klerk, when he was receiving his Nobel Peace Prize (together with Nelson Mandela), as quoted by Eriksen in chapter ten, reveals how important was the Southern African liberation struggle to Norway since the late 1950s.

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