A Biography of Dickson Netsha Sibanda

Starting businesses in Zambia and aiding the struggle for Zimbabwe

Pathisa Nyathi

 

Synopsis

Dickson Netsha Sibanda’s life encompasses a great number of the key events of the past half century in Zimbabwe and the central African region as a whole. This biography is as much a social, economic and political history as much a history of one man. It is a story about movement and the cultural changes it brought, encompassing the pre-colonial arrival of Sibanda’s family in what would become Matabeleland, the upheavals of the arrival of the Ndebele and colonialisation by the British South Africa Company. Sibanda’s life is also a political story encompassing the rural spread of nationalism and armed struggle in exile. Above all the Sibanda’s story is one of an irrepressible entrepreneur with a powerful desire for education and unable to let opportunity pass him by.

Review

Dickson Netsha Sibanda's life is a fitting topic for the historian Pathisa Nyathi. Nyathi has over the years explored the lives of many eminent characters, be they nationalists, soldiers, church leaders, or businessmen. - Jocelyn Alexander, University of Oxford

Author

Pathisa Nyathi is a published poet, playwright, historian and biographer based in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe.