Mutsvangwa Slams Tagwirei’s Alleged Bid to ‘Buy’ Central Committee Seat

📅 Published: August 19, 2025

Curated by AllZimNews.com

His father was employed as a miner at Shabani Mines.

Sithole was educated at Mzingwane Secondary School and was trained as a teacher at Solusi Mission.

His political consciousness was awakened in April 1947 when he was forced to join a greeting party for King George VI and the Royal Family during their visit to Cecil Rhodes’ grave.

In 1958, as political tensions across Africa and in Southern Rhodesia were escalating, Sithole switched careers, abandoning teaching and joining a Bulawayo blanket factory, Consolidated Textiles, as an accounts clerk.

He quickly became active in the Textile and Allied Workers’ Union.

One of Sithole’s first engagements as a labour activist was to successfully lobby for a minimum wage.

When the Southern Rhodesian government declared an emergency in 1959 and banned the nationalist movement, he was one of several hundred figures detained without charge.

In 1962, he became involved in party politics as the founding Vice-President of the short-lived Pan-African Socialist Union (PASU).

That October he travelled to New York with party president Paul Mushonga.

In an address before the United Nations, Sithole condemned the Rhodesian government as “a vicious minority settler team bent on perpetuating white supremacy. ”  Upon his return to Rhodesia, customs officials at Salisbury Airport delayed him for approximately 90 minutes, confiscating many of his documents.

He was subsequently charged with possessing subversive propaganda and received a 12-month jail term.

Following Mushonga’s death in a car accident that December, Sithole became PASU’s Acting President.

In early 1963, alongside Wiseman Zengeni (who subsequently became one of only three non-ZANU-PF candidates returned at the 1990 parliamentary election) he toured several west African capitals on behalf of the party.

Later that year he brought PASU into the fold of the newly created Zimbabwe African National Union under the leadership of Reverend Sithole.

Following this merger, he reverted to leadership roles in trade union circles and from which he continued to vigorously oppose white minority rule.