Charles Mzingeli dating history

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Charles Mzingeli (1905–1980) grew up on a Catholic mission station near Plumtree in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. At the age of 14 he ran away to work on the railways, before moving to Bulawayo, where he became involved in the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union (ICU), and worked with figures like 'Sergeant' Masotsha Ndlovu. The ICU, a radical trade union, started in South Africa in 1919, but spread into neighboring colonies in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1929 Mzingeli was sent to Harare Township at Salisbury (now Harare) as the ICU's organizing secretary. The ICU disintegrated in South Africa as well as in Southern Rhodesia in the 1930s, but it had pioneered black trade unionism in the latter, where it had played a major role in both urban and rural protests.