Muzorewa, Abel Tendekayi

▪ prime minister of Zimbabwe Rhodesia

born April 14, 1925, Old Umtali, Southern Rhodesia [now Zimbabwe]

      prime minister of Zimbabwe Rhodesia from June to December 1979, in a transitional period from white to black rule.

      Muzorewa was educated at Methodist schools in Southern Rhodesia and then spent five years (1958–63) at the Central Methodist College, Fayette, Mo., and at Scarritt College, Nashville, Tenn., in the United States. After some years as teacher, lay preacher, youth work organizer, and pastor, he became a bishop of the United Methodist Church in 1968.

      Muzorewa first emerged as a political figure in the 1970s at a time when all the major black politicians in the country were in prison or in exile. When the British government sent emissaries to Rhodesia to test public opinion about proposals for a settlement of the conflict between whites and blacks, Muzorewa took a leading part in mobilizing opposition to the offered terms. At the time he appeared as a spokesman for the veteran nationalist leader Joshua Nkomo; but the two men quarreled after Nkomo's release from detention, and Muzorewa chose to remain leader of his own party, the African National Council, founded in 1971 and renamed the United African National Council (UANC) in 1977. He was a member of the Transitional Executive Council set up to prepare the transfer to majority black rule in Rhodesia in 1978–79; and, when his party won a commanding 51 seats in the interim parliamentary elections of 1979, he became prime minister of “Zimbabwe Rhodesia.” When the vestiges of white rule were removed in late 1979 and when the nationalist parties of Robert Mugabe (Mugabe, Robert) and Joshua Nkomo (Nkomo, Joshua) entered the parliamentary elections of 1980, the UANC was reduced to three seats. Muzorewa was outspoken against Mugabe's government and was jailed in 1983 on suspicion of subversion. After his release, he retired from politics in 1985. In 2007, after years of economic crisis in Zimbabwe and amid growing discontent with the Mugabe administration, there was speculation that Muzorewa might return to the political arena and stand in the 2008 presidential elections, although that did not come to pass.

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