AS millions of Germans celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall last week’s memories reverberated with mixed emotions back home due to cultural, political and historical homogeny of the two countries.

As a former German colony Namibia maintains strong cultural linkages even though it was occupied for almost 70 years by South Africa after World War I.
While Swapo’s freedom fighters took refuge mostly in neighbouring Zambia and Angola, the then liberation movement sent hundreds of children to East Germany or German Democratic Republic (GDR) for education and training. The children became known as the “GDR Kids”.  
At the height of the cold war, the Central Committee of the GDR encouraged this political initiative as freedom fighters across the African continent incentivised to embrace communism.
The fall of the Berlin Wall eclipsed a new world order that not only freed the East Germans from the Communist rule but ended 40 years of Namibia’s liberation struggle and the eventual repatriation of Namibia’s liberation fighters.
 Implications for Namibia and
South Africa
The apartheid state in Namibia and South Africa was in part a product of the global division that followed the end of World War II.
Although racial segregation was evident in Namibia and South Africa in colonial times, apartheid as an official policy became entrenched and fortified with the West-Eastern Europe’s political divide.
Hence, the most remarkable events that can be attributed to the end of the Cold War was the attainment of Namibia’s independence, the release from jail of Nelson Mandela and the consequent handover of power by the apartheid regime in South Africa.
The fall of the Berlin Wall just came shortly before the decisive battle of Quito Cuanavale  - Africa’s largest land battle since World War II.
The battle involved the combined forces of the People’s Armed Forces for the Liberation of Angola (FAPLA), People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN) and the Cuban international military contingent against South African forces.
Historians say the battle of Quito Cuanavale was one of the most important episodes of both civil war in Angola and the war along the South African border.
Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, then Namibia’s Information and Broadcasting Minister described the battle of Quito Cuanavale as having changed the military and the political situation in southern Africa in favour of the oppressed.
The battle was the Stalingrad of apartheid, the decisive battle which defeated Pretoria’s agenda of establishing regional hegemony, a strategy which was seen as vital to defend and preserve apartheid.
The battle has attained the legendary status as it is considered the debacle of apartheid, a rout of the South African Defence Force (SADF) which altered the balance of power in the region and heralded the demise of racist while rule in Namibia and South Africa.
“It formed the road map to total liberation of our beloved country and end of political injustices perpetrated by the apartheid regime,” said Nandi-Ndaitwah.
Demise of African dictatorship
The fall of the Berlin Wall, had implications on a global scale and ended the devastating wars in Namibia, South Africa, Angola and paved the way for negotiated settlements.
According to Professor Ali Mazrui, the Kenyan-born Historian and Director of the Institute for Global Cultural Studies, white minority in South Africa opportunistically played the victim of the growing influence of communism.
Without the fall of Berlin Wall, the history of Namibia and South African might have taken a different course. With the imminent demise of the Soviet Union and communist rule in Eastern Europe, communism had lost its appeal in southern Africa, particularly exiled Namibians and South Africans.
The radical anti-communism of the apartheid regime had become hollow and increasingly unconvincing simultaneously, as it had lost its prime target. 
The events of two decades ago brought not only the end of communism in Europe, and its placement with market economies, but also the eventual demise of a string of vicious and corrupt dictators around the world, who had been kept in simply as tools of East-West confrontations.
It has led to the creation and strengthening of more states on the African continent, with emphasis on pro-people governments, rather than most African governments remaining as merely appendages of Moscow or the Washington-London-Paris axis.
On the negative side it coincided with the collapse of the Somali state, which has never recovered to date. Ethiopia, which under Haile Mariam Mengistu was an East German ally, was re-engineered as a federal republic, but with part of it breaking away to create the new state of Eritrea.
Mazrui says that the end of the Cold War meant that the big powers took their eyes off the continent. “It reduced the strategic value of Africa,” he pointed out, “because it ended competition between big powers and their eagerness to get African allies. And it reduced motivation on the part of the eastern bloc to support Africa in United nations institutions with votes and, in southern Africa, with arms for the struggle against apartheid.
 Lessons for Namibia
According to German Ambassador to South African, Dieter Haller, much has been achieved since German celebrated unification in 1990, even though there are still tangible differences between former East and West federal states in economic and social developments, in cultural and political preferences and in voting patterns.
“Thus our German once-in-a lifetime experiences taught us to be patient  with each other. One generation certainly is not enough to heal the wounds, to forgive all the perpetrators and to become one again.
There are potential lessons for Namibia which has been ethnically and racially divided for more than a century since the German genocide a century ago. Namibian politicians ought to be at the fore-front of uniting rather than dividing the country. At the heart of the peaceful revolution in Eastern Europe was the quest for freedom and democracy.
The freedom to vote for a particular political party, freedom of speech, freedom of movement and the freedom to live one’s own life without undue interferences from the state are some of the virtues Namibia should inculcate as fundamental lessons from the peaceful revolution in Eastern Europe as the country marks its fourth Parliamentary and Presidential elections.

(additional information from external sources)