SWANU had its roots in the South West African Student Bureau (SWASB), an association of Namibian students studying at South African universities during the 1950s. The students had been radicalised by their firsthand exposure to
apartheid in South Africa, and the active resistance to that system by the
African National Congress (ANC). Throughout late 1959, SWANU and the Herero Chiefs' Council organised a bus boycott in
Windhoek's
Old Location, in response to forced evictions being undertaken by the
South African Police. Kozonguizi was initially confident the money would be awarded to SWANU due to its international prominence and the fact that many of its members had been educated at prestigious institutions, namely in the United States and Western Europe.
Zambia, another country which had been initially sympathetic to SWANU, began refusing to accept Namibian refugees who were members of that party. With SWANU exiles considered prohibited immigrants in both Zambia and Tanzania, they were forced to settle almost solely in
Botswana. Botswana was willing to accept Namibian refugees, but forbade them from engaging in politics. From 1968 onward the party declined into political obscurity and played no major role in the Namibian independence process. SWANU did make a belated attempt to raise its own guerrilla army, which was not formally established until 1975. The OAU was unimpressed and declared it would sanction only one guerrilla army in Namibia. It urged SWANU guerrillas to join the
People's Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN), SWAPO's armed wing, instead. Aside from China and initially, Egypt, no countries were willing to supply training or arms to SWANU. SWANU's requests for military aid from various socialist states in the Soviet sphere such as
Nicaragua and
Vietnam were rejected. Most of these states had already offered support to PLAN, and the negative examples of Angola and Zimbabwe, where rival guerrilla armies ultimately fought each other, were frequently cited as a pretext for declining aid to SWANU. SWANU did establish one guerrilla training camp in Botswana at Dukwe, where it succeeded in smuggling some weapons. However, most of its preparations for armed struggle were purely theoretical in nature and due to Botswana's refusal to endorse guerrilla camps on its soil, all training had to be conducted on a covert basis. For the duration of the
South African Border War, SWANU insurgents were confined to the Dukwe camp and did not participate in the hostilities. ==Policies==