Stanlake and Tommie Marie Samkange

It was 1980, in Salisbury.

That year, Zimbabwe became independent. And a publisher in the city brought out a book: Hunhuism or Ubuntuism.

Its authors were a couple. Stanlake Samkange, historian and novelist. And Tommie Marie Samkange, his wife.

Stanlake had been born in 1922 in Zvimba, in Mashonaland, when the country was called Southern Rhodesia.

His father, Thompson Samkange, was a Methodist minister and a nationalist politician. His mother, Grace Mano, was an evangelist. The boy grew up between Bulawayo and Mashonaland.

He went to study in South Africa, at Adams College, then at the University of Fort Hare. He graduated with honours in 1948.

That same year, he came home and became a teacher.

He conceived Nyatsime College, a secondary school run by Black Africans. It opened its doors in 1962.

Tommie came from the United States. A Black American woman, she settled in Southern Rhodesia in 1958. She would play an important part in education in the future Zimbabwe.

Stanlake also worked as a journalist. He was active in liberal politics in the 1950s and 1960s.

Then came disillusion. He concluded that the white minority would never accept a government shared among the races.

In 1966 his novel On Trial for My Country appeared. It became his best-known book. In Rhodesia, it was banned.

He earned a doctorate at Indiana University. He taught African history at American universities, Harvard among them. In 1978, he was a professor at Northeastern University, in Boston.

That same year, he went home. He held senior posts in African nationalist parties. He ran for office twice, without success.

Before the Lancaster House talks in 1979, he left active politics. He wanted to write.

And so came 1980.

Stanlake and Tommie Marie offered hunhu. Hunhu is ubuntu, spoken in Shona.

Their book carried a subtitle: A Zimbabwe Indigenous Political Philosophy.

For them, hunhu said something about a person's character. About their conduct.

They linked hunhu to humanism. Their book became a kind of philosophical handbook of hunhu and ubuntu in Zimbabwe.

Today, scholars count them among the first generation of Black African thinkers of ubuntu, alongside Mogobe Ramose and Desmond Tutu.

This is Ubuntu in the full sense, offered as a political philosophy for a whole country.

Stanlake Samkange died in Zimbabwe on March 6, 1988.

He left novels and a school. The two of them left a book written with four hands, in the year of Zimbabwe's independence.