By Saul Gwakuba-Ndlovu
DR CALLISTUS DINGISWAYO (CD) NDLOVU, one of Zimbabwe’s national liberation struggle patriots, died on Wednesday, February 13 2019, in Johannesburg, South Africa, at the age of 83 and was declared a national hero on February 16 2019.
He was the ZANU PF Bulawayo provincial chairman and had been rather unwell for quite a few years.
Dr Ndlovu, a truly self-made individual, was born in Plumtree and received his primary education at Dombodema School and secondary at Empandeni Mission.
Supported and deeply motivated by his mother, a daughter of the well-known Nkobi family of the Bamadlila clan, he read very much and matriculated in 1961.
He was an extremely brilliant student throughout his academic career, and excelled virtually in every subject except manual activities such as bricklaying, a subject in whose theoretical aspect, however, he was way ahead of the whole class.
At Empandeni Mission, he was converted to Roman Catholicism, and consequently changed his name from Feorce (Phiosi or Fiyosi) to Callistus.
Feorce Dingiswayo were his birth names. Becoming a Roman Catholic required him to adopt a name of a saint of that Church.
He chose Callistus, a name of a pope who was declared a saint after his death. He discarded his original first name, Feorce.
At Empandeni, he had, meanwhile, been very active in political activities of Zimbabwe’s liberation movements; first as a member of the National Democratic Party (NDP) which, after it was proscribed in 1961, was succeeded by the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU).
Dr Ndlovu enrolled for a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree at the Roma University College in Basutoland, now Lesotho, in 1962.
He and other Zimbabwean students formed a ZAPU branch there and he was elected its chairman.
He had also been elected the president of the Students’ Representative Council, a position which threw him into the students’ politics, two of whose objectives were to decolonise the world in general and Africa in particular; and the other being to replace South Africa’s apartheid regime with a freely elected government based on one person, one vote.
He completed his BA degree in 1965 and returned home to teach at Bulawayo’s Mpopoma High School in 1966.
ZAPU had been outlawed for some three or so years, but had defied that ban and went underground.
Dr Ndlovu (who had not yet attained a philosophy doctorate) became quite active in that party’s underground programme in Bulawayo.
The Rhodesian white minority security personnel soon caught up with him and locked him up at the Khami Maximum Security Prison.
There was no obvious evidence against him, however, so he was released in 1967.
He left the country for Zambia from where he procured a scholarship and went to Hofstra University in New York where, after two or so years, he was awarded a philosophy doctorate and immediately declared a professor.
He lectured there, while politically he was the ZAPU chairman in North America, that party’s official representative at the United Nations as well as in the United States as a whole.
As an academic, Dr Ndlovu was, some time in the early 1970s, declared the best history lecturer at that university.
He went to the ZAPU offices in Zambia regularly for briefing and consultations.
When ZAPU formed a revolutionary council in 1972, Dr Ndlovu became one of its members.
Shortly after the ZAPU president, Joshua Nkomo, was released from Gonakudzingwa in December 1974, ZAPU formed a central committee of which he became a member.
He was the chief ZAPU political advisor at, first, the October 1976 to January 1977 Geneva Conference, thereafter at the January 1978 Malta Consultative Meeting and, lastly, at the Lancaster House Conference in London in the last quarter of 1979.
On his home-coming in 1980, he worked for one or two private companies and then joined Government where he was appointed to the Cabinet.
While in his teens, he took his mother’s advice about education very seriously. His mother was especially committed to his education. Her brother, Njini, was also eager that Ndlovu should become at least a professional teacher.
His mother, who was a close relative of the writer of this brief biography, would urge Ndlovu to emulate him. He (the writer) had done Grade One and Two in one year and Form One and Two also in one year.
Dr Ndlovu had very high respect and much love for his mother. She had been denied an opportunity to attend school by her traditionally-minded father.
He achieved much more than she had expected.
A devoted father of five, Dr Ndlovu was endowed with a retentive and extremely analytical mind.
He has gone with his massive wealth of historical and sociological knowledge and Zimbabwe is, most regrettably, the poorer for his death.
Saul Gwakuba-Ndlovu is a retired, Bulawayo-based journalist. He can be contacted on cell
0734 328 136 or through email. sgwakuba@gmail.com