As if he knew history would not be kind to him: Ndabeningi Sithole and Zimbabwean history

Africa Talks Seminars 2024

Speaker: Dr Tinashe Mushakavanhu, University of Oxford

Nationalist politics was an unforgiving sport. Even though Ndabaningi Sithole was the founding president of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), he has been until recently a maligned figure in Zimbabwe's liberation history. After falling out with his comrades, he was labelled a 'traitor', 'sellout', 'puppet' until his death in 2000. His successor, Robert Mugabe, had a reason for wanting him forgotten. Sithole fashioned himself as an intellectual politician and spent most of his years in detention alongside his comrades, writing and attempting to theorise the struggle in real time. He was the most published 'Zimbabwean' author between 1956 and 1980. Tinashe Mushakavanhu explores this complicated figure through the first major biographical book, Ndabaningi Sithole: A Forgotten Founding Father (2023) published in the Voices of Liberation Series by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) Press in South Africa.