Mandume ya Ndemufayo

Mandume ya Ndemufayo was born in 1894 in Oihole, Cunene province. Ascending the throne at age seventeen in 1911, he immediately implemented revolutionary judicial reforms, banning the arbitrary confiscation of cattle and defending commoners against corrupt aristocrats.

When Portuguese forces invaded southern Angola in 1915, King Mandume routed them at the Battle of Omongwa. Pressed simultaneously from the south by British-South African imperial forces, Mandume fought a heroic two-front war. On February 6, 1917, surrounded at the Battle of Oihole, he fought to his final bullet rather than surrender. Both Angola and Namibia revere him as a joint national hero.