Sam Nujoma of Namibia Dead at 95

Sam Nujoma, the founding president of an independent Namibia, who led a Soviet-backed guerrilla army in an uneven fight against the vastly superior forces of white-ruled South Africa in a victory that owed much to the dynamics of the Cold War, died on Saturday. He was 95.

Mr. Nujoma died in Windhoek, Namibia’s capital, according to the country’s current president, Nangolo Mbumba, who announced the death on Sunday. His statement did not give a cause of death but said that the former president had been hospitalized with an illness for three weeks.

A bearded, bespectacled man given to trading his camouflage fatigues for business suits, depending on his audience, Mr. Nujoma pursued twin tracks of diplomacy and insurgency in a decades-long quest for the liberation of his country — a sprawling but sparsely populated former German colony that Pretoria ruled in defiance of the United Nations.

When independence finally came in March 1990, though, it was the product of a United States-brokered deal to secure South Africa’s withdrawal in return for a pullout by 50,000 Cuban soldiers from neighboring Angola, which had provided a crucial rear base for Mr. Nujoma’s guerrillas.

Mr. Nujoma and his South-West Africa People’s Organization, known as Swapo, which was formed in 1960 after he fled Namibia in exile, played no direct part in the negotiations that led to the agreement. And though Mr. Nujoma adopted a nom de guerre — shafiishuna, or lightning — there was no record of his direct participation in combat.

For years, South Africa’s white rulers had insisted that Namibia, which they called South-West Africa, was the final buffer against the southward advance of Communist influence in Africa. So when the Soviet Union collapsed, Pretoria’s oft-repeated claim to be a pro-Western bulwark against Moscow’s encroachment lost its relevance.

As independence approached, Mr. Nujoma’s party abandoned what some had depicted as a drive for a Marxist one-party state, and agreed to multiparty elections and a democratic Constitution that seemed to reinforce his longstanding insistence that he was a nationalist rather than an ideologue.

Nonetheless, many analysts detected an autocratic streak. Re-elected to a second term in 1994, he oversaw a constitutional change that allowed him to run for a third term in the 1999 elections, ignoring an earlier commitment to term limits.

A full obituary will follow.

Erin Mendell contributed reporting.