Zimbabwe African People's Union

The Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU) was one of the two principal movements whose armed rebellion, alongside international pressure, helped end white rule in Rhodesia and establish Zimbabwe in 1980. Led by Joshua Nkomo, it became a target of Robert Mugabe’s consolidation of power after independence and was absorbed into the governing ZANU-PF in 1987.

Formation and opposition to white rule

In 1965, the white elite in Rhodesia, led by Ian Smith and representing possibly 5 percent of the population, declared independence from Britain. Few governments recognized the declaration, and the United Nations imposed economic and political sanctions. Black citizens organized guerrilla resistance from bases in neighboring Mozambique and Zambia. ZAPU, led by Joshua Nkomo, was one of the two main groups involved, alongside Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU).

The book places ZAPU’s resistance in the longer history of settler rule and dispossession. After a 1890 military expedition by the British South Africa Company, white settlers annexed much of the land; by 1923 they had obtained self-government, and a white-only apartheid state was constructed. Against this background, the rebellion and international pressure helped force a negotiated end to white rule and the creation of Zimbabwe in 1980.

Marginalization after independence

Independence did not end political conflict. Mugabe quickly established personal control, using violence against opponents or bringing them into his camp. The gravest violence described took place in Matabeleland, ZAPU’s heartland of support, where as many as twenty thousand people were killed in the early 1980s.

By 1987, ZAPU had merged with ZANU to create ZANU-PF. Nkomo was politically sidelined. The merger thus marked both the formal incorporation of the opposition movement and the weakening of its independent political role under Mugabe’s rule.

Place in Zimbabwe’s political order

The book presents the outcome as the formation of a de facto one-party state. Mugabe rewrote the constitution inherited through the independence negotiations, became president after first serving as prime minister, abolished the white voter rolls included in the agreement, and eventually eliminated the Senate in 1990 while introducing legislative positions he could fill by appointment. ZAPU’s trajectory—from a principal force in the struggle against minority rule to a merged and marginalized party—forms part of that post-independence concentration of power.