Victoria Chitepo

Victoria Fikile Chitepo (27 March 1928 – 8 April 2016) was a Zimbabwean politician, activist and educator. She was the wife of Herbert Chitepo, a leading figure in the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), but was a major political figure in her own right and served as a minister in the government of independent Zimbabwe between 1980–1992.

She was born as Victoria Mahamba-Sithole in the South African coal-mining town of Dundee in KwaZulu-Natal. She was educated in South Africa and attended the University of Natal, where she was awarded a B.A. degree, and took a postgraduate degree in education at the University of Birmingham in the UK. She met her future husband, Herbert, at Adams College near Durban in South Africa. Between 1946 and 1953 she taught in Natal, but moved to what was at the time the British colony of Southern Rhodesia in 1955 after she married her Zimbabwean husband, who was working as a social worker in the capital Salisbury (now Harare).

In 1960, Chitepo became involved with the National Democratic Party, a nationalist movement that campaigned for political rights for Rhodesia's disenfranchised black majority. She led a women's sit-in at Salisbury's Magistrate's Court in 1961 to promote the campaign for black citizenship.

A year later, she went with her husband to Tanganyika (now Tanzania) and worked as a social worker aiding black Rhodesian refugees in Dar es Salaam for three years, between 1966 and 1968. In 1975, Herbert Chitepo was assassinated in Lusaka, Zambia by agents of the Rhodesian government. She remained in Tanzania until Rhodesia – renamed Zimbabwe – gained its independence and black majority rule was established in 1980.

On returning to Zimbabwe, Victoria Chitepo stood for election in the constituency of Mutasa and Buhara West in the country's first multiracial elections. She won a seat for ZANU-PF in the lower chamber, the House of Assembly. She was appointed as Deputy Minister of Education and Culture and subsequently as Minister of Information and Education by the then Prime Minister, Robert Mugabe.

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