The World - News from April 11, 1988

Members of the governing party of Zimbabwe voted to approve a merger with the main opposition party in another step toward a one-party Socialist state. More than 3,000 delegates to a congress of the Zimbabwe African National Union (Patriotic Front) in Harare endorsed the merger accord, signed Dec. 22 by President Robert Mugabe and former opposition leader Joshua Nkomo. “The entire nation is certainly rejoicing with us today,” Mugabe said after the vote. Members of Nkomo’s Zimbabwe African People’s Union voted April 2 to dissolve the party and merge. Nkomo, 70, and Mugabe, 64, led rival armies in the war in the former British colony of Rhodesia that led to Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980.