Charles Mzingeli

I was shocked recently to discover I had never heard of Charles Mzingeli and yet he was the most well known African leader in what was then Salisbury in the 1940s. His renown did not reach to every corner of the land but it was there where it mattered in Highfield and the former township of Harare, now Mbare.

Mzingeli grew into his role gradually, cutting his political teeth on concrete township issues, the right of women to reside with their husbands, the bus boycott, etc. He was a politician who learnt his trade with specific issues. His vision was to create a common citizenship for all the people. The phrase imperial citizenship came up time and again.

Why should Africans be denied the right to full citizenship in the empire? He asked that question repeatedly, chipping away at the oppressive laws governing people at that time. His organisation was the startlingly named Reformed Industrial and Commercial Workers Union of Africa. In effect it was an amalgam of a town advisory board, a trade union and a political party. When the Harare Township Advisory Board was set up he was elected Chairman year after year. He became in effect the mayor of Harare.

Mzingeli was a bottom up politician. He drew his strength from his attention to the particular grievances of actual people. He would go to the township authorities and lobby for them. His reputation grew from within his constituency. No external force secured his position and when he was eventually voted out he went. I suspect that if most of us were asked to list the genealogy of leaders in Zimbabwe, stretching back from Mugabe to Sithole, to Nkomo, to Nyandoro and Chikerema we would be at a loss to go back further.

And perhaps this is no wonder because the next on the list would certainly be Mzingeli but he represented a quite different politics. If his was bottom up theirs was top down. The politics of the Salisbury City Youth League in the 1950s brushed aside the patient chipping away of Mzingeli and demanded instant reforms. The radical nature of the Leagues politics set markers for every political party that followed.

The Leagues politics were quite understandable because the white government was showing no willingness to move towards imperial citizenship but something was lost in the transition from Mzingeli to Chikerema and Nyandoro. For the latter it was now the broad appeal. They felt no need to secure their position by patient listening to people. They were sure of their position and in fact did all the talking just as their successors did.

Anyone who did not agree with them was a sell out and gradually the support of the people was secured, not by proving ones ability to address their grievances but by force. The final impasse came in 1964 when the Rhodesian government had an easy time in simply locking up all the leaders for ten years.

There is little point in speculating what might have happened if Mzingelis brand of politics had survived. That is all water under the bridge. We have to deal with our situation as it is now 60 years after he lost the vote to be chairman of the Harare Advisory Board. But sooner or later, if we are to reach any kind of social contract between the governed and the governing, we will have to learn again the art of listening to people.