Zimbabwe African National Union

The Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), also known as ZANU, was one of the principal African nationalist movements that fought white-minority rule in Rhodesia. Its guerrilla campaign, conducted from neighboring countries and joined by the rebellion of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU), helped force a negotiated transition to independence in 1980. In the years that followed, ZANU’s merger with ZAPU created ZANU-PF, while Robert Mugabe consolidated personal control and narrowed political competition.

Formation and the struggle against white rule

Rhodesia’s white-minority political order had colonial roots. In 1890 the British South Africa Company sent a military expedition into the Ndebele kingdom in Matabeleland and neighboring Mashonaland; superior weaponry quickly suppressed African resistance. White settlers later annexed much of the land, and in 1923 secured self-government from Britain. A white-only apartheid state followed, modeled on South Africa’s system.

In 1965, as European colonial empires were collapsing, the white elite led by Ian Smith declared Rhodesia independent from Britain. That elite represented possibly 5 percent of the population. Few governments recognized the declaration, and the United Nations imposed economic and political sanctions. Black citizens organized a guerrilla war from bases in neighboring Mozambique and Zambia. ZANU, led by Mugabe, was one of the two main organizations prosecuting the rebellion; the other was ZAPU, led by Joshua Nkomo.

Independence and political consolidation

The combined pressure of international opposition and armed rebellion led to a negotiated end to white rule. Zimbabwe was created in 1980. Independence changed who held state power, but did not by itself displace the country’s inherited economic arrangements or guarantee a pluralistic political order.

Mugabe quickly established personal control after independence, using both the violent elimination and the co-option of opponents. The most severe violence described in the account occurred in Matabeleland, ZAPU’s heartland, where as many as twenty thousand people were killed in the early 1980s. In 1987 ZAPU merged with ZANU to form ZANU-PF, and Nkomo was sidelined politically. The merger therefore accompanied not just organizational consolidation but the defeat of a rival political center.

From liberation movement to dominant party

Mugabe rewrote the constitution inherited from the independence negotiations, becoming president after beginning as prime minister. He abolished the white voter rolls that had formed part of the independence agreement and, in 1990, abolished the Senate and introduced legislative positions he could nominate. The resulting system was a de facto one-party state headed by Mugabe. ZANU-PF’s emergence as the dominant party thus belonged to a wider concentration of political authority, rather than an expansion of durable competition among independent political groups.

The new government also inherited extractive economic institutions established under white rule. These included price and trade regulations, state-run industries, and obligatory agricultural marketing boards. State employment expanded, with jobs going to ZANU-PF supporters. Regulation served the party’s political interests by making it difficult for an independent African business class to emerge and challenge its monopoly of power. The account draws an irony from this arrangement: whites remained the principal business class, while the highly productive agricultural export sector was initially left untouched. The movement that had helped end white rule consequently governed through institutions that restricted independent economic and political power.