Andimba Toivo ya Toivo, a Namibian independence leader whose struggle against his country’s South African rulers landed him for 16 years in the infamous Robben Island prison, where with his steadfastness he earned the admiration of Nelson Mandela, a fellow inmate, died June 9. He was 92.
His death was reported by the Associated Press and by Namibian outlets including New Era, which said Mr. ya Toivo died at his home in a suburb of Windhoek, the country’s capital, of a suspected heart attack.
Mr. ya Toivo fought what the London Guardian once described as a decades-long “war of nerves” with South Africa in behalf of Namibia. South Africa assumed control of the onetime German colony through a League of Nations mandate at the end of World War I.
To Mr. ya Toivo and his supporters, South African rule became particularly intolerable — although it had always been unacceptable — after the country instituted its apartheid system of racial segregation in 1948.
An activist since the early 1950s, he had helped found the independence movement known as the South West Africa People’s Organization, or SWAPO, which challenged South African rule through protest and guerrilla warfare. (Namibia at the time was known as South West Africa.)
In 1968, after being convicted of violating a South African terrorism law, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison, where he would survive torture and solitary confinement. He had faced possible execution but credited a lawyer, who reportedly engaged the help of American officials including U.S. Sens. Robert F. Kennedy (D-N.Y.) and Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), with helping him avoid that fate.
Mr. ya Toivo’s declamation at the Pretoria courthouse where he was tried helped draw international attention to his — and the Namibian — cause.
“We find ourselves here in a foreign country, convicted under laws made by people whom we have always considered as foreigners. We find ourselves tried by a judge who is not our countryman and who has not shared our background,” he said. “We are Namibians and not South Africans.”
Entering prison, he said he knew “the struggle will be long and bitter,” according to the publication the Namibian, but “I also know that my people will wage that struggle, whatever the cost.”
Mandela, the anti-apartheid leader and future South African president who would serve 27 years in prison, arrived at Robben Island in 1964 and came to regard Mr. ya Toivo as “a formidable freedom fighter.”
In prison, Mr. ya Toivo declined to participate in the behavior grading system instituted by wardens that might have allowed him improved conditions — but that also, in his view, would have conceded the legitimacy of South African authority. “He didn’t care to be promoted and he wouldn’t cooperate with the authorities at all in almost everything,” Mandela recalled, accordingto the Nelson Mandela Foundation.
“He was quite militant,” Mandela said. “He wanted very little to do with whites, with the warders.”
At one point, Mandela participated in a hunger strike to show solidarity with Namibians including Mr. ya Toivo. On another, after a guard reportedly attacked him, Mr. ya Toivo returned the assault, ending up in solitary confinement. He said that he received three or four visits in all his years of imprisonment.
Even his captors noticed his resolve.
“Ya Toivo would not bend when others took bribes in prison in order to get more privileges,” Christo Brand, a former Robben Island guard, told the Namibian in 2014 on Mr. ya Toivo’s 90th birthday. Brand described him as “cut out of the same rock as Mandela.”
Mr. ya Toivo was released in 1984 and spent the following years in exile. Namibian independence did not come until 1990, in part because of its small role in the ongoing Cold War. Namibian insurgents received support from the Soviet Union and Cuba. In exchange for the peace agreement that permitted independence, Cuban troops were ultimately forced to withdraw from another Communist-backed African nation, Angola.
After independence, SWAPO became Namibia’s ruling party, with Mr. ya Toivo serving as secretary general. For periods he was minister of mines and energy, labor and prisons under President Sam Nujoma, a former SWAPO organizer who had spent many of the preceding years in exile.
According to most accounts, Mr. ya Toivo was born Herman Andimba Toivo ya Toivo in the village of Omangudu, in northern Namibia, on Aug. 22, 1924. The Canadian Globe and Mail wrote that he was born Andimba Mwandecki and was given the name Toivo ya Toivo, meaning Hope of Hope, at the Finnish mission school he attended.
After finishing his schooling and serving with the Allies in World War II, he worked as a teacher before moving to Cape Town in 1951. He became a leader in the Modern Youth Society and helped form precursors to SWAPO.
Shortly after his release from prison, while attending a rally held by the radical feminist leader Angela Davis in New York, Mr. ya Toivo met Vicki Erenstein, an American lawyer, whom he married in 1990. They had twin daughters, Mutaleni and Nashikoto, and three adopted children. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.
“I have come to know that our people cannot expect progress as a gift from anyone, be it the United Nations or South Africa,” Mr. ya Toivo said, speaking before the court that would send him to prison in 1968. “Progress is something we shall have to struggle and work for. And I believe that the only way in which we shall be able and fit to secure that progress is to learn from our own experience and mistakes.”