Archival Significance
Ndabaningi Sithole’s foundational 1959 text, part autobiography and part political argument, published four years before he became the founding president of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) in 1963. Sithole went on to lead ZANU largely from prison between 1964 and 1974, and this remains one of the earliest published statements of Zimbabwean nationalist thought by a figure who became central to the liberation movement.
Institutional Context
Published by Oxford University Press, Cape Town, with a foreword by R. S. Garfield Todd, a former Southern Rhodesian prime minister known for his relatively liberal stance on African political rights within the settler establishment.
Content Summary
Combines autobiography with an argument for African nationalism and self-determination in the colonial Rhodesian context.
Research Utility
A primary source of central importance for researchers of Zimbabwean nationalist thought and the intellectual origins of the liberation movement.
Abantu Archives Note
Held in-house.