Andimba Toivo ya Toivo

Herman Andimba Toivo ya Toivo was born in Omangundu, in the Ovamboland region of what was then the South African mandate territory of South West Africa, on the twenty-second of August 1924. He took his early education at Finnish Lutheran mission schools and served in the South African Auxiliary Forces during the Second World War.

He moved to South Africa in 1951 and worked in Cape Town through the early 1950s. He became active in the South West African anti-colonial cause and, in 1957, founded with Sam Nujoma (also placed in this archive) the Ovamboland People's Organisation (OPO) — the political vehicle that, in 1960, was renamed the South West African People's Organisation (SWAPO).

He was deported by the South African authority from Cape Town to South West Africa in late 1958 — for his organizing work — and continued to lead OPO and then SWAPO inside the territory through the 1960s while Nujoma operated in exile abroad. He was arrested in October 1966 after the founding battle of the Namibian War of Independence at Omugulugwombashe and tried in Pretoria under the South African Terrorism Act in 1968.

His statement from the dock at the conclusion of the trial — "We are not now standing as the accused before this Court. Rather it is this Court which is being judged by us, by our people" — became one of the founding political documents of Namibian independence. He was sentenced to twenty years in prison on Robben Island.

He served sixteen of the twenty years and was released in March 1984. He led SWAPO inside the territory through the final years of the independence war and entered the post-independence Namibian Cabinet under Nujoma on Namibian independence (the twenty-first of March 1990) — serving in successive ministerial positions through 2006.

He died in Windhoek on the ninth of June 2017, age ninety-two.

He is honored here as the SWAPO co-founder whose sixteen Robben Island years preceded Namibian independence.