Namibia: Unhappy Holiday

South Africa takes over again

"Degrading." A "futile exercise." With those brusque dismissals, Dirk Mudge, 55, a blunt-spoken rancher and politician, rang down the curtain last week on the latest act in southern Africa's longest-running shadow play: progress, or more accurately the lack of it, toward independent self-government for the vast and arid territory of Namibia. For more than three decades, South Africa has ruled Namibia in defiance of world opinion and United Nations resolutions. For the past four years Mudge and fellow members of his multiracial Democratic Turnhalle Alliance (D.T.A.) exercised nominal authority over local affairs in...

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