Charles Mzingeli

Charles Mzingeli (1905–1980) grew up on a Catholic mission station near Plumtree in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. At the age of 14 he ran away to work on the railways, before moving to Bulawayo, where he became involved in the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union (ICU). The ICU, a radical trade union, started in South Africa in 1919, but spread into neighboring colonies in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1929 Mzingeli was sent to Harare Township at Salisbury as the ICU’s organizing secretary. The ICU disintegrated in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia in the 1930s, but Mzingeli remained active, and developed connections with the South African Communist Party and the short-lived Communist Party of Southern Rhodesia. In the early 1940s he became involved with the Southern Rhodesian Labor Party, which had recently opened its doors to blacks. In 1945, following a massive strike by black railway workers, he decided to launch a Reformed Industrial Commercial Union (RICU). It was an important force into the 1950s, campaigning for black township residents, and reaching 7,000 members. From the mid-1950s he was increasingly challenged by hard-line nationalists associated with the Southern Rhodesia African National Congress, which later developed into the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU), from which emerged the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), as a split, which is today the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union - Patriotic Front (ZANU–PF). Mzingeli was politically marginalised in the 1960s and 1970s, and died in 1980.