His determination to achieve racial and social justice in Zimbabwe soon made him a respected and important voice in the party. He was one of the principal opponents of the 1961 constitutional compromise offering black Africans token representation in a still white-dominated government. This document offered no specific target date for adopting majority rule and it proposed a two tier electoral system whose upper level was available only to voters who had completed secondary school, thereby eliminating a majority of the black African population, giving blacks only half the voting power of whites. Such was the vociferous opposition of the 450,000 blacks that the United Nations called upon Britain to suspend the new constitution and begin discussions about true majority rule.
That same year the government banned NDP, but Mugabe retained his position in the successor party, the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU). When ZAPU was banned in 1962, Mugabe was restricted for three months, but he eluded imprisonment and fled to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, which had become the party's operational headquarters in exile. He organized regular broadcasts to Zimbabwe from Radio Tanzania.
Dissension over tactics split the ZAPU leadership, and Mugabe and other ZAPU dissidents returned home to form a new nationalist party, the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), in August 1963.
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