November 10, 2003. Politician and Zimbabwe’s first president who served from 1980 to 1987, Canaan Sodindo Banana dies.

Canaan Sodindo Banana was born on March 5, 1936 in Essexvale, in what is present-day Esigodini, a village in the Matabeleland South Province of what was formerly Southern Rhodesia and is currently Zimbabwe.

Born to an Ndebele mother and a Basotho father who had emigrated from Lesotho, Banana was first educated at a local mission school and completed his secondary education at Tegwani High School in the town of Plumtree. He then studied at a teacher training institute before earning a diploma in theology at Epworth Theological College in Salisbury (today Harare), the capital and most populous city of Zimbabwe.

Banana met and married Janet Mbuyazwe in 1961, and a year later was ordained a United Methodist minister. Together, Janet and Canaan had four children, three sons and a daughter. Between 1963 and 1966, Canaan worked as a minister and school administrator before he was elected Chairman of the Bulawayo Council of Churches in 1969, a position he held for two years.

From 1970 to 1973, Banana chaired the Southern Africa Content Group, working for the All Africa Conference of Churches and serving as a member of the Advisory Committee of the World Council of Churches.

It is during this pivotal time that he became involved in anti-colonial politics, when he began to embrace Black liberation theology and criticize the Rhodesian government, which in 1965, under the leadership of Ian Smith, had declared the country independent under white-minority rule.

Banana’s early activism included publishing his own version of the Lord’s Prayer, a central Christian prayer taught by Jesus, where he rewrote the text to incorporate words encouraging Africans to resist white supremacy, with lines such as, “Teach us to demand our share of the gold/And forgive us our docility.”