As the political ambitions of the Rev Ndabaningi Sithole, who died on December 12th aged 80, failed one by one, he descended irretrievably down the political ladder of Zimbabwe. Yet once he had been at the centre of his homeland's politics. Indeed, he was seen by some as the first black man, in what was then Rhodesia, to express the philosophy underlying the black nationalist cause.
In 1960, a year after the publication of his book, African Nationalism, Ndabaningi Sithole was invited to join the executive of the National Democratic Party, of which he became treasurer. Led by Joshua Nkomo, the NDP was, in Rhodesia, a key sign of the emergence of black nationalism, and, as such, it was subjected to massive attack by the white minority government.
In 1963, soon after the NDP turned into the Zimbabwe African People's Union (Zapu), Ndabaningi Sithole quit and, backed by the young Robert Mugabe, set up the Zimbabwe African National Union (Zanu), becoming its first president, with Mugabe as secretary-general. Black politics in Rhodesia in the 1960s were an arena of intense internal rivalries and splits over strategy, with major conflicts between Zapu and Zanu. Meanwhile, in April 1964, Ian Smith swept to power, at the head of his extreme rightwing, white minority government.
Zapu and Zanu were banned, and Ndabaningi Sithole, among many others, was detained. Four years later, he was to be found fervently supporting the armed struggle, arguing against reconciliation with Smith and urging his assassination. The move got him convicted, in February 1969, on incitement charges.
But what followed destroyed Ndabaningi Sithole's reputation. In court, after being sentenced, he disassociated himself "in word, thought or deed from any subversive activities, from any terrorist activities, and from any form of violence". By 1974, Mugabe had replaced him as Zanu leader.
Ndabaningi Sithole was born at Nyamandhlovu, north of Bulawayo, in Matabeleland; his mother was Ndebele, his father, a poor builder, of Ndau origins. He saved up for his education, which he got in his mid-teens at the Didaya Mission, under headmaster Garfield Todd, who was later to be a liberal prime minister before the final stages of right-wing white rule.
In 1939, he obtained a £10 Beit bursary, and took a twoyear teaching diploma at the Waddilove Training Institute. He was a teacher for 14 years, instructing first at kraal schools and then at higher institutions. At Tegwani Training Institution in 1948, he took intensive bible studies, becoming a preacher for the (British) Methodist Church, before joining, in 1950, the United Methodists, and teaching at Mount Selinda American Methodist Mission. While there, he obtained a BA degree by correspondence course.
Impressed with its young pupil, in 1955 the mission sent Ndabaningi Sithole to the Newton Theological College in Massachusetts. When he returned to Rhodesia in 1958, he was ordained at Mount Selinda Congregationalist Church and appointed principal of Chikore Central Primary School.
Ndabaningi Sithole had begun his political ascent. In 1959, he was asked to address the African Teachers' Association at Fort Victoria, and lobbied so effectively that he was elected president of the group. But the Rhodesia into which Ndabaningi Sithole was released in 1974 after his incitement sentence - he was briefly detained again in 1975 - was very different. The ascent had begun of what became Mugabe's Zanu-Patriotic Front, while Ndabaningi Sithole's version of Zanu had withered. In 1978, after three years in Tanzania, Ndabaningi Sithole returned to Rhodesia as the struggle for independence and the guerrilla war were reaching their climax.
Ndabaningi Sithole said he saw Rhodesia as a unique problem, requiring a pragmatic approach, even though some young men might regard him "as a moderate and a has-been". The latter he proved himself to be. Smith desperately stitched together an internal settlement, with Bishop Abel Muzorewa, Chief Jeremiah Chirau and Ndabaningi Sithole, in an abortive attempt to fend off international pressure. This led to an entity called Zimbawe-Rhodesia and elections in which Ndabaningi Sithole's Zanu was defeated by Muzorewa's United African National Council.
Then, in 1980, came the Lancaster House deal, independence, and Mugabe's triumph. In the mid-1980s, Ndabaningi Sithole went into voluntary exile in the United States, where he worked covertly with the right-wing Heritage Foundation, which also sponsored the Zulu Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, and the apartheid-backed Renamo movement in Mozambique.
In the early 1990s, Ndabaningi Sithole returned to Zimbabwe. At the time, Mugabe, ordered the seizure of Ndabaningi Sithole's farm, provoking a political explosion. Another kind was to follow. Consumed with his hatred of Mugabe and other Zanu-PF leaders, who despised and undermined him in equal measure, Ndabaningi Sithole increasingly lost touch with public opinion. The more he did so, the deeper he dug himself into a hole.
In 1995, he was elected to parliament from Chipinge, but was arrested soon afterwards, following a botched and amateurish explosives attempt on a Mugabe motorcade; in 1997, he was jailed for two years. But he never served the sentence - he was too old and sick, he waved away the case as a frame-up, and the authorities anyway regarded him as a spent force.
In the long run, it was Mugabe, with his guns and radicalism, who had won the day, while Ndabaningi Sithole had just kept taking the wrong turns.
He is survived by his second wife, Vesta. They had four daughters (two deceased) and two sons.
Ndabaningi Sithole: born 1920; died, December 2000