1987 — Zimbabwe's Unity Accord

On December 22, 1987, Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo signed the Unity Accord at State House in Harare, merging their rival parties into one. The accord ended the Gukurahundi — a brutal five-year campaign that had killed an estimated twenty thousand civilians in Matabeleland and the Midlands.

A blanket amnesty was granted, Nkomo joined the government, and the date became Zimbabwe's National Unity Day. Unity here was not an abstraction: it was the formal end of a campaign whose cost was counted in tens of thousands of civilian lives. That Zimbabwe keeps the date each year as National Unity Day shows the accord's purpose — to mark the day the killing stopped and rivals chose one government.