Thirty-six years after Anton Lubowski’s assassination, the wound remains open and the questions still sting. That grief deserves recognition and compassion. No family should carry the weight of a loved one’s unresolved murder. The sorrow of Gabrielle and Nadia Lubowski is real, and their yearning for answers is understandable. But grief, no matter how deep, cannot stand in for proof. Pain is not evidence, and in their recent interview the two women drift from mourning into dangerous conjecture. Their claims that Sam Nujoma, SWAPO’s founding president, was effectively a South African asset and complicit in Anton’s killing are not just extraordinary; they are unsupported and risk doing more harm than good.
The known facts have been tested repeatedly. Namibian and South African inquiries, spanning decades and political transitions, point squarely to the apartheid regime’s Civil Co-operation Bureau (CCB) as the authors of Lubowski’s murder on 12 September 1989. Judge Harold Levy’s Namibian inquest identified Irish mercenary Donald Acheson as the gunman and named a string of CCB operatives as accomplices. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), with its exhaustive hearings and declassified archives, confirmed this picture of CCB planning and apartheid-state authorship. Neither the inquest nor the TRC implicates Nujoma. If anything, their records reinforce that Lubowski himself was targeted precisely because he opposed the apartheid system, hardly the mark of a family in league with Pretoria.
Against this carefully documented history, the interview offers only haze: vague talk of “three parties”, SWAPO leaders, South Africans and a mining “dynasty”, who supposedly agreed the case “must never be touched”; an unverified claim of a private bank folder showing Nujoma receiving money from both South Africans and Americans; recycled speculation that he was a “protégé” of apartheid handlers; and a long detour into childhood wounds, blood moons and spiritual forgiveness. These reflections may be moving, but they are no substitute for corroboration.
Extraordinary allegations require ordinary discipline: documents, sworn statements, chain-of-custody exhibits. None were produced. If a document exists proving secret payments to Nujoma by the apartheid state or the CIA, let it be tabled. If a pact was struck to bury the case, name the signatories, the date, the minutes. If a roadblock sting framed Acheson with an AK-47, show the operational orders, not simply a belief that he “should have” had a gun. History and law share a common principle: allegations must be testable and verifiable. The interview falls far short of that standard.
The conversation further blurs categories. The very real trauma of SWAPO’s Lubango detentions in the 1980s is invoked as though it proves a plot to kill Lubowski. That cruel chapter, ex-detainees have long challenged SWAPO’s “wall of silence, demands continued acknowledgment and accountability. But acknowledging Lubango is not the same as proving Nujoma’s complicity in a CCB assassination. Linking them by emotional association is a non sequitur.
Personal anecdotes also become shaky scaffolding. We are told that Nujoma was at times cold, at times cordial. That is evidence of shifting human moods, not espionage or murder. We are urged to “follow the money,” then pointed vaguely to the Panama Papers, without a single cited entry connecting Nujoma personally to illicit offshore wealth. Assertions about diamonds, unemployment and “compromises” at independence are real grievances, but they do not establish a causal chain to Anton Lubowski’s murder. Conflating social frustration with specific criminal culpability is not investigation; it is insinuation.
The danger of revisionism
Namibians should resist a lazy historical revisionism that replaces documented apartheid perpetration with a story that floats on coincidence and hurt feelings. The record we possess, Levy’s findings, TRC archives, sworn testimony, anchors our understanding in verifiable fact. Attempts to leap over that evidentiary edifice with speculation require a firm, factual rebuttal.
This is not to silence debate. It is legitimate to demand transparency from SWAPO about Lubango. It is healthy to scrutinise liberation movements’ conduct in exile. It is proper to keep pressing for justice in unsolved cases. But trading the rigour of evidence for the seduction of narrative helps no one, least of all the Lubowski family themselves. They deserve truth, not tales.
Media platforms carry a duty to challenge, not indulge, sensational claims. When a guest asserts that a founding president was a foreign proxy or that accessories to murder “agreed the case must never be investigated,” the interviewer must press: What document? What sworn affidavit? Which docket number? Audiences deserve references to archives, not atmospherics. Without such discipline, journalism risks encouraging a politics of accusation untethered from fact.
Honouring Anton Lubowski
Anton Lubowski was re-interred at Heroes’ Acre on 26 August 2015, a national recognition of his sacrifice. The best way to honour his memory is to defend the discipline he embodied: principled courage rooted in reality. Until credible new evidence, documents, depositions, chain-of-custody records, emerges, the CCB remains the proven culprit. Attempts to recast Nujoma as a Pretoria asset belong where all unsupported theories belong: in the margins, not the history books.
It may be fashionable in conspiracy culture to invite the public to “join the dots.” But dots do not join themselves; they are linked by evidence. In the Lubowski case, the dots that actually exist point unmistakably to apartheid’s dirty-tricks apparatus, not to a grand collusion between SWAPO’s leader and his enemy. That conclusion may not soothe the family’s grief, and empathy requires us to acknowledge their continuing pain. But empathy is not an excuse to abandon evidence. When memory and suspicion outrun facts, justice recedes, and the wounds of 1989 risk never healing at all.
