Stanlake John William Thompson Samkange (1922–1988) was a Zimbabwean historiographer, educationist, journalist, author, and African nationalist.
Samkange was born in 1922 in Zvimba, Mashonaland, in British South Africa Company-administered Southern Rhodesia.
While pursuing his teaching career he began to make plans for Nyatsime College, a secondary school to be controlled by black officials rather than the government or missionaries.
He retired from active politics before the talks that led to the Lancaster House Agreement in 1979, concentrating instead on his writing.
Samkange’s best-known work, On Trial for My Country (1966), is a tale told by an old man of the imagined twin trials of Cecil Rhodes and Lobengula, the Ndebele (or Matabele) ruler, who are each tried by their ancestors for their respective parts in obtaining and granting the various concessions that led to the occupation of Matabeleland, Mashonaland and their environs by Rhodes's British South Africa Company in the 1880s and 1890s.