Joshua Nkomo

Joshua Mqabuko Nyongolo Nkomo was born in Semokwe Reserve, Matabeleland, Southern Rhodesia, on the seventh of June 1917, the son of an Ndebele lay preacher. He took his secondary education at Adams College in South Africa and his undergraduate degree at the University of South Africa (1952) — among the very few Black students permitted at the institution under apartheid.

He returned to Southern Rhodesia in 1952, organized the Railway African Workers' Union, and led the African National Congress of Southern Rhodesia from 1957. The successor organizations he led — the National Democratic Party (1960-61) and the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU, from December 1961) — established the principal political vehicle for African political representation against Ian Smith's white-minority Rhodesian government.

Nkomo led ZAPU through the seventeen-year armed struggle that followed Smith's 1965 Unilateral Declaration of Independence. ZAPU operated from Zambia under Kenneth Kaunda's protection (also placed in this archive); its military wing ZIPRA conducted operations across the Zambezi against the Rhodesian military through the 1970s. The schism that produced the rival Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) under Ndabaningi Sithole and later Robert Mugabe in 1963 split the liberation movement along Ndebele/Shona lines that would shape post-independence Zimbabwean politics.

The 1979 Lancaster House Agreement produced the constitutional settlement and the 1980 elections; ZANU won the elections; Mugabe became Prime Minister. Nkomo served briefly in the unity government, was dismissed in 1982, and lived through the Gukurahundi massacres of 1983-87 in which the Zimbabwean military's Fifth Brigade killed approximately twenty thousand Ndebele civilians in Matabeleland.

He returned to government as Vice President in 1990 and held the office until his death.

He died in Harare on the first of July 1999, age eighty-two.

He is honored here as the founder of ZAPU and the surviving founder of Zimbabwean independence.