Black nationalist leader Joshua Mqabuko Nkomo was buried on July 5th as a symbol of unity in Heroes' Acre in Harare, Zimbabwe, to cries of "unity, unity, unity" from his one-time rival, President Robert Mugabe.
In many ways the symbolism was apt. During the last decade of his life the white-haired and rotund Nkomo - who died of prostate cancer in a Harare hospital on July 1st shortly after his 83rd birthday - came to be known as the Father of the Nation or, more simply, as Umdala Wethu (Our Old Man).
Nkomo, who was a major political actor in the establishment of the black-ruled state of Zimbabwe in 1980, played an important role in unifying the main rival black nationalist parties: Zapu, which he led, and Zanu-PF, which Mugabe led. A critical milestone in resolving their bitter rivalry was reached in December 1987 when Nkomo signed an agreement providing for a merger between his Zimbabwe African People's Union and Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Union. The union ended the brutal and costly civil war in the first decade of Zimbabwe independence between the Shona-dominated Zanu-PF and the Ndebele followers of Zapu in the province of Matabeleland.
The unified party retained the name Zanu-PF and was led by Mugabe. Nkomo was given a relatively powerless position in the government as Minister in the President's office. Later a largely ceremonial post of Vice-President was created for him, one which functioned in tandem with the existing Vice-Presidential office, occupied by Simon Muzenda. Thus, from the perspective of Ndebele hardliners, when Nkomo signed the merger agreement, his signature signified capitulation to Mugabe, though to be fair to him the Ndebele were a minority tribe in Zimbabwe, constituting a mere fifth of the black people against the four-fifths who were Shona-speaking.
Towards the end of his life, more than a decade after the merger, the corpulent Nkomo - whose girth expanded to its impressive proportions during his long internment by the Smith government at Gonakudzinga in the south-east of Zimbabwe - still served the cause of unity. Nkomo, whose wife Johanna bore him five children, was born on June 6th, 1916 to poor parents who worked for the London Missionary Society. Though widely acknowledged as the leader of the Ndebele, he was a member of the neighbouring Kalanga tribe which was partially absorbed into the more powerful Ndebele community. He started formal schooling relatively late at the age of 14. Like many Zimbabweans, he travelled south to neighbouring South Africa for his secondary schooling. After matriculating, he returned to Bulawayo in Rhodesia, where he was employed by Rhodesia Railways as a social worker.
An educated man - he obtained a university degree - he was one of the post-second World War generation of black nationalists who sought at first to attain redress of their grievances through pleas and protest but who later strove to win them through militant action.
By 1957 Nkomo was a national political figure. He was elected president of the African National Congress of the Southern Rhodesia in that year. Within two years of his election the ANC was banned by the the Rhodesian authorities. Nkomo responded by forming the ANC under a different name, the Zimbabwe African People's Union or Zapu, and by advocating armed resistance.
In 1961 he changed tack, entered into constitutional talks with the Rhodesian government and accepted an offer of 15 seats for the black majority - out of a total of 65 - in the belief that it provided a beach-head which would led to majority rule. But his acceptance was denounced as "treachery" by militants led by Ndabaningi Sithole, who later led Shona dissidents out of Zapu to form the rival Zimbabwe African National Union (only to eventually lose the leadership of Zanu to Mugabe). Nkomo, realising that he faced pariah status as a "sell out", backtracked and repudiated the constitutional deal. From then on, except for a brief period in the mid-1970s when, after his release from detention, he was involved in settlement talks with Smith's UDI Rhodesian government, Nkomo spearheaded armed resistance by Zapu and its guerrilla army, the Zimbabwe People's Revolutionary Army or Zipra.
Towards the end of colonial rule, Zipra insurgents were closing in on Smith's beleaguered regime from the west while Zanla guerrillas loyal to Mugabe attacked from the east. In a prelude of the civil war to come, rival guerrilla forces sometimes fought one another instead of Smith's soldiers.
During that period Nkomo incurred the enmity of many whites. After his guerrillas shot down a civilian aircraft with a surface-to-air missile, killing 40 white passengers, he was asked in a television interview how they had succeeded in downing the plane. "With stones", he replied with an audible chuckle, which instantly transformed him from "Good Old Josh" to public enemy number one in the eyes of a majority of white Rhodesians. Later, after independence, he explained in his autobiography that he was not laughing at the death of the passengers but at his evasive answer. But by then he had rekindled white dislike of him by his sporadic but virulent warnings of race war if whites continued to resist the black nationalist drive against economic inequality.
In 1980 Nkomo's hopes of winning the prize of power he had sought for so long were thwarted by Mugabe, whose Zanu-PF decisively won the independence election, capturing nearly three times as many seats as Zapu. He served briefly in Mugabe's coalition government as Minister for Home Affairs before being dismissed amid charges that he was planning a military coup after the discovery of arms caches on Zapu-owned land in Matabeleland. The rebellion, and the pitiless response of Mugabe's brutal Fifth Brigade which ensued, were followed by the unity pact and Nkomo's political rehabilitation from "Father of the Dissidents" - in Mugabe's phrase at the time of the civil war - to "Father of the Nation".
Joshua Mqabuko Nkomo: born 1916; died July, 1999