East African Gazette
Namibia
Grief has engulfed the African Continent after the bad news of the death of Namibia’s President Hage Geingob.
Hage Geingob, Namibia’s longest-serving prime minister and third president, passed away early Sunday morning February 4,2024 in a hospital in the Namibia’s Capital Windhoek, where he was receiving treatment for cancer. He died at age of 82 years
Born in a village in northern Namibia in 1941, Hage Gottfried Geingob was the southern African country’s first president outside of the Ovambo ethnic group, which makes up more than half the country’s population.
The deep-voiced leader studied at Fordham University in New York, and much later in life received a PhD in the United Kingdom. While in the US, he remained a vocal advocate for Namibia’s independence, representing the local liberation movement, SWAPO, now the ruling party, at the United Nations and across the Americas.
In the early 1970s he started a career working for the UN on governance issues. Seen as a centrist, he returned to Namibia in 1989, a year before the country’s independence.