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Will Zanu PF survive after Mugabe?
Ibbo Mandaza
From The Day After Mugabe, Africa Research Institute
November 01, 2007

Read more from The Day After Mugabe: Prospects for change in Zimbabwe

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Zimbabwe's ruling party, ZANU-PF, has developed over a period of 44 years as part of the mainstream nationalist movement. Its antecedents were the African National Congress of Southern Rhodesia, the National Democratic Party (NDP), which succeeded it in 1959, and the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU) whose name was adopted in 1961 when the colonialists banned the NDP. ZANU was formed in 1963 as a breakaway from ZAPU.

A decade or so later, ZANU and ZAPU formed a broad-based guerrilla war coalition known as the Patriotic Front (PF), which in 1979 negotiated the terms of Zimbabwe's independence in constitutional talks at Lancaster House, London. But the two strands remained essentially separate in both leadership and operations. Their headquarters were in different countries, with PF-ZAPU based in Lusaka, Zambia, under the leadership of Joshua Nkomo, and ZANU-PF under Robert Mugabe in Maputo, Mozambique.

The Patriotic Front coalition became strained in the months following independence, after ZANU-PF won 57 of 100 parliamentary seats in the first general election of 1980. PF-ZAPU picked up only 18. The two parties were merged in 1987 under a Unity Accord, on terms which were less a reassertion of the former Patriotic Front coalition than a confirmation of the political dominance of Robert Mugabe and his ruling party. The name ZANU-PF was retained.

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