Bernard Chidzero

Bernard Chidzero
Second Finance Minister of Zimbabwe
In office 1985–1995
Preceded by	Tichaendepi Masaya
Succeeded by	Emmerson Mnangagwa

Bernard Thomas Gibson Chidzero (1 July 1927 – 8 August 2002) was a Zimbabwean economist, politician, and writer. He served as the independent Zimbabwe's second finance minister.

Bernard Thomas Gibson Chidzero was the eldest of seven children. His father, a Malawian, James Kangolwa Imfa Idzalero, was originally from Ntchisi, in Malawi who walked to Rhodesia, in 1913, stopping over on tea estates in Southern Malawi as well as performing menial labour on the Beira-Dondo railway line. His mother Agnes Munhumumwe was from the Shona. Bernard Chidzero was raised in the Seke area of Chitungwiza. He was schooled at primary school in Seke and then at Kutama College (a prestigious Roman Catholic high school), where he played in the school band alongside fellow pupil Robert Mugabe. Chidzero converted to Catholicism while at Kutama. He then attended St. Francis College in Mariannhill in South Africa.

Chidzero obtained a degree in psychology from Pius XII Catholic University College in Lesotho, an MA in political science from the University of Ottawa, and in 1958 a PhD in political science from McGill University in Montreal, where he married a French-Canadian woman.

He then undertook two years post-graduate study at Nuffield College, Oxford. Early on Chidzero became interested in African politics and as a Pan Africanist he became friends, in the London African circuit, with giants like Jomo Kenyatta, Kwame Nkrumah, Hastings Kamuzu Banda, Seretse Khama and others.

In 1957 Chidzero published a Shona novel Nzvengamutsvairo (the name has been translated from Shona as "Mr Lazy-Bones" or "Broom-Dodger") which detailed the condition of workers on Rhodesian farms and set out his vision of an integrated, racially tolerant society.

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