Ozier Muhammad Photojournalist

Southwest Africa Becomes Namibia

In 1989 the Southwest African Peoples Party's candidate for the presidency, Sam Nujoma, defeated the Democratic Turnhalle Coaltion, a party of dutch settlers. This SWAPO victory brought blacks to power for the first time in this country, in which the victors renamed Namibia. The Republic of Southwest Africa was a colony of the Republic of South Africa, and had imposed the same system of racial separation on blacks, known as apartheid.

Sam Nujoma leads SWAPO to victory.
   
A poll watcher for the Democratic Turnhall Coalition, the white party that has held on to political power since this part of southern Africa became a proxy region for the apartheid South African government.
   
A Bush woman wakes on the morning of the date, which her homeland will be significantly transformed from a nation, which, later that same day, will no longer be divided along racial lines.
     
  
A boy sips water from a cup in a tiny village on the morning of his nation's first non-racial elections.
  
This couple woke at daybreak and prepared themselves for the day's tasks ahead, which included voting in the first non-racial election in their nation's history.
   
A bush woman smokes and breast feeds her child on the morning of the first day of balloting in the first non-racial election in SW Africa's history.
     
  
1989 -Tsumnkwe Boy of Bushmanland, near a polling place during a week of voting in the first non-racial election in his country's history.
   
1989 - These men provided syncopated clapping as a man danced and jumped after the United Naiton declared that SWAPO, the Southwest African Peoples Party had defeated the Democratic Turnhall Coalition, a satelite political organization which was endorsed by the Nartional Party of South Africa.