Ndabaningi Sithole

Ndabaningi Sithole.

One The Great House of Stone's great African leaders, in Rhodesian and Zimbabwean times, Ndabaningi Sithole was born in Nyamandlovu in 1920 on the 31st of July to Jim Sithole an immigrant who came to Rhodesia from Gazaland, seeking fortune and adventure and his wife Siyaphi Tshuma. He became a Christian preacher and participant in the liberation struggle he instrumental in the formation of ZANU back in 1963, helped by Robert Mugabe. Educated at local mission schools in the then Rhodesia and later in the United States. In November 1965, just before 11th, when the Rhodesian government declared itself a sovereign state, Sithole and other leaders of ZANU were arrested by Rhodesian police and he was arrayed before the courts, where he denounced the armed struggle. While he was in prison, he was deposed as a leader of ZANU by Robert Mugabe, who then added PF to the PF, Patriotic Front and thus the party became, what we know it as today, ZANU (PF). After independence in 1980, he re-organized his party ZANU and stood for elections in 1982 but he lost and two years later, he left the country for the United States where he lived in self imposed exile after claiming that Mugabe was plotting to assassinate him. He returned to Zimbabwe in 1992 and in 1995, he won a parliamentary seat for Chipinge, his tribal stronghold. In 1997, he was arrested for plotting an assassination of Mugabe and he was barred from parliament and sentenced to two years in jail but he did not serve any time in jail because of ill-health. He died on December 13th 2000, in Philadelphia, United States from heart complications. Sithole published a book African Nationalism in 1959 and the second edition of the same book in 1968. He also authored numerous newspaper and journal articles, he also wrote a biography of Obed Mutezo (1970), a novel The Polygamist (1972) and an account of the Zimbabwe struggle, Roots of a Revolution (1972).

Sithole, in 1979 was part of the transitional government of blacks and whites but failed to win any seats in the independent elections that were held in 1980 that saw Mugabe clinch the victory that he is still holding on to to this day.