The birth of OPO

The organised liberation struggle was not born in a palace or a parliament. It was born among contract workers, far from home. In Cape Town in the late 1950s, Namibian workers and students, among them Andimba Toivo ya Toivo, began meeting to talk about the one thing every man on contract understood: the system that ruled their lives was built without them, and it would never change by itself.

In 1959 that talk became an organisation. The Ovamboland People's Organisation, OPO, was launched in Windhoek with Sam Nujoma as its president, its base among the contract workers of the compounds. Its first demands were concrete: end the contract labour system, and end South African rule over the territory.

That same year, the city of Windhoek decided to move Black residents out of the Old Location, the settled township near the centre, to a new site further out: Katutura, a name remembered as meaning “the place where we do not stay.” Residents resisted, with boycotts and protest. On the night of 10 December 1959, police opened fire on protesters. At least eleven people were killed and dozens wounded.

The shootings changed everything. Protest had been met with bullets, and the lesson was drawn on both sides. Within months, on 19 April 1960, OPO reconstituted itself as the South West Africa People's Organisation, SWAPO: no longer a regional workers' body but a national movement with a national goal, independence.

10 December is kept today as Namibia's Human Rights Day, in memory of the Old Location dead. In the next module, the movement they left behind picks up arms.