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“The hardest lesson in my life has come to me late. It is that a nation can win freedom without its people becoming free.”

Source: Nkomo: The Story of My Life (London: Methuen, 1984), final chapter

Context Written in exile after he fled Zimbabwe in 1983, as the Gukurahundi crackdown hit his ZAPU supporters in Matabeleland, the memoir ends by weighing what independence had delivered.

Portrait of Joshua Nkomo
Joshua NkomoZimbabwe · 1917–1999
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