Sam Nujoma, the founding president of an independent Namibia, who led a Soviet-backed guerrilla army in an uneven fight against the vastly superior forces of white-ruled South Africa in a victory that owed much to the dynamics of the Cold War, died Saturday in Windhoek, Namibia’s capital. He was 95.

Nangolo Mbumba, the country’s current president, announced the death. He did not give a cause but said the former president had been hospitalized for three weeks.

Praising Nujoma as one who had “heroically marshaled the Namibian people during the darkest hours of our liberation struggle,” he said a period of national mourning would be announced.

A bearded, bespectacled man given to trading his camouflage fatigues for business suits, depending on his audience, Nujoma pursued twin tracks of diplomacy and insurgency in a decades-long quest for the liberation of his country — a sprawling but sparsely populated former German colony that South Africa ruled in defiance of the United Nations.

When independence finally came in March 1990, though, it was the product of a United States-brokered deal to secure South Africa’s withdrawal in return for a pullout by 50,000 Cuban soldiers from neighboring Angola, which had provided a crucial rear base for Nujoma’s guerrillas.

Nujoma and his South-West Africa People’s Organization, known as SWAPO, which was formed in 1960 after he fled Namibia in exile, played no direct part in the negotiations that led to the agreement. And though Nujoma adopted a nom de guerre — Shafiishuna, or Lightning — there was no record of his direct participation in combat.

For years, South Africa’s white rulers had maintained that Namibia, which they called South-West Africa, was the final buffer against the southward advance of communist influence in Africa. So when the Soviet Union collapsed, the oft-repeated claim to be a pro-Western bulwark against Moscow’s encroachment lost its relevance.