His father, Daniel Utoni Nujoma, and his mother, Mpingana-Helvi Kondombolo, worked the land. As a boy, Mr. Nujoma said in his memoir, he tended the family cattle and goats, carrying a baby on his back to free his mother to work in the fields.
With only modest formal education, Mr. Nujoma moved at age 17 to the coastal enclave of Walvis Bay, where he worked at a general store and a whaling station before relocating to Windhoek as a cleaner on the railroad system. After hours, he studied English at night school. In 1956, he married Theopoldine Kovambo Katjimne. They had three sons, and a daughter who died at 18 months. Mr. Nujoma was in exile by then and unable to attend her funeral, he wrote, because the police would have arrested him.
In the late 1950s, as Ghana’s independence from Britain in 1957 became an emblem of liberation for many Africans, Mr. Nujoma was associated with organizations that were forerunners of SWAPO, notably…
