Ndabaningi Sithole (born 1920) was a teacher, clergyman, and politician who played a critical role in the early nationalist movement in Zimbabwe (formerly Southern Rhodesia). A leading African intellectual, he epitomized the plight of Africans during the period of the former Southern Rhodesia's system of racial discrimination.

Ndabaningi Sithole was born on July 21, 1920, in the rural area of Nyamanandhlovu. He was brought up in a pagan household and spent his early years in a typically tribal environment in an isolated part of the country. He was seven years old before he first saw a white person. The family moved to Shabani in 1930, and in 1932 Sithole started attending a school run by British Methodist missionaries. His father, however, opposed the idea, and Sithole left the school at the end of 1932 and became a servant in a white home. But the urge to become educated remained, and in 1935 he defied his...