Joshua Nkomo

Joshua Nkomo trained as a social worker before becoming involved in trade union activism in Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe), where a small white minority held political and economic control over the majority Black population under an increasingly repressive colonial system.

Nkomo became a leading figure in the independence movement, founding the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU) in 1961 to organise resistance against white minority rule. He was repeatedly detained and imprisoned by the Rhodesian government over the following decade, including a lengthy period of restriction that kept him confined without trial, while ZAPU's armed wing joined the broader liberation struggle known as the Rhodesian Bush War.

Following years of guerrilla conflict and international pressure, Rhodesia's white minority government agreed to negotiations that led to Zimbabwean independence in 1980. Nkomo contested the country's first democratic elections but lost to his rival Robert Mugabe, and tensions between their respective parties and ethnic support bases later erupted into a violent government crackdown in the Matabeleland region during the 1980s, during which Nkomo briefly fled the country. He and Mugabe eventually reached a unity agreement in 1987, and Nkomo served as Vice President of Zimbabwe until his death in 1999, remembered as one of the founding fathers of Zimbabwean independence despite the troubled history of his later political career.