Ndabaningi Sithole; Founded Zimbabwe’s Ruling Political Party

Ndabaningi Sithole, the founder of Zimbabwe’s ruling party, has died.

Sithole died of a heart ailment in a Philadelphia hospital on Tuesday, state television reported Wednesday. He was 80.

One of Africa’s most prominent black nationalist leaders in the 1960s and 1970s, Sithole founded the Zimbabwe African National Union party in 1963.

The party was banned in 1964, and Sithole spent the next 10 years as a political detainee with fellow nationalist leader Robert Mugabe.

Sithole lost the leadership of the party to Mugabe, who is now president of Zimbabwe, during an internal rift after the two were released from prison in 1974.

Sithole was tried and convicted for plotting to assassinate Ian Smith, the last white leader of Rhodesia, as Zimbabwe was known before independence in 1980.

Sithole joined a transitional government of whites and blacks preparing Rhodesia for independence under the name Zimbabwe in 1980, but his opposition group failed to win any seats in independent elections that swept Mugabe to power.

Sithole went into self-imposed exile in Silver Spring, Md., in 1983. He returned to Zimbabwe nine years later.

He was elected a lawmaker for his tribal stronghold of Chipinge in southeastern Zimbabwe in 1995. Two years later he was tried and convicted of conspiring to kill Mugabe and disqualified from attending the Harare parliament.

Born in Nyamandhlovu, Sithole was ordained as a Methodist minister in 1958. He worked for a time as a teacher and a school administrator and was elected president of the African Teachers Assn. in 1959.

The author of three books on African politics and a novel, Sithole is survived by his wife, Vesta, and five adult children.