Born in Southern Rhodesia, self-made intellectual Edson Sithole (1935–1975?) was a lawyer (the first Black person in southern Africa to earn a doctorate in law), an anticolonial nationalist, and a trailblazing pan-Africanist with one of the strongest voices in Zimbabwe's liberation movement. A political prisoner for nearly half of his adult life, he vanished in 1975—presumably kidnapped and killed by the Rhodesian Special Branch, though that has never been proved. 

Brooks Marmon traces Sithole's life, presents unabridged transcripts of both his writings and interviews with him, and...