By Mafa Kwanisai Mafa

THE history of Zimbabwe is deeply entangled with the broader African struggle against imperialism, colonial exploitation, and cultural erasure. From the transatlantic slave trade and European colonial conquests to missionary-led religious subversion and modern-day economic sanctions, the Zimbabwean experience reflects a continuum of foreign domination and African resistance.

Rooted in the Afrocentric tradition and guided by pan-Africanist and decolonial philosophies, this essay interrogates the tools and tactics of empire in Zimbabwe — focusing on the psychological, spiritual, and material dimensions of conquest — and calls for renewed resistance grounded in revolutionary consciousness and African unity.

Though Zimbabwe was not a central hub of the transatlantic slave trade like West Africa, the logic of commodifying African bodies and labour was part of early imperial penetration. The slave trade institutionalised anti-blackness, reducing Africans to chattel for European profit. In Southern Africa, slavery took other forms, such as raiding, forced migration, and later labour conscription under colonial rule.

This dehumanisation laid the groundwork for the colonial occupation of Zimbabwe by Cecil Rhodes’ British South Africa Company (BSAC) in the 1890s. Africans were seen not as human beings, but as tools to extract wealth. This mindset persists today in neoliberal economic systems that continue to rob African nations of sovereignty and self-determination.

The Letter from King Leopold II to Colonial Missionaries (1883) provides a rare, explicit account of how Christianity was used as a tool of empire. Though addressed to missionaries in the Congo, the principles applied equally to Southern Africa, including Zimbabwe.

Leopold’s directive made clear: the goal was not to spread genuine spirituality but to “inspire above all Belgium interests”. Missionaries were instructed to ‘evangelise’ Africans into submission, using scripture to encourage poverty and obedience, suppress indigenous spirituality and dismantle community structures of resistance.

In Zimbabwe, the arrival of Christian missionaries coincided with colonial conquest. Schools and churches were used not to liberate, but to pacify. Traditional leaders, spiritualists, and war rituals were demonised. The spiritual bases of resistance, such as the Mwari religion at Matonjeni, were labelled heathen and dismantled. Through education and religious conversion, the colonisers aimed to produce submissive Africans who would not challenge white supremacy.

Land is the cornerstone of identity, spirituality, and sustenance in African cosmology. In Zimbabwe, colonialism violently ripped land away from indigenous communities. The Land Apportionment Act of 1930 was the legal anchor of dispossession, allocating fertile land to a white minority while relegating the black majority to marginal ‘Native Reserves’.

This displacement was not only physical but psychological. By stripping Africans of land, the colonisers attacked their cosmology, spirituality and ancestral connection. It was in this context that figures like Chief Chingaira Makoni and Nehanda Nyakasikana resisted colonial encroachment, asserting that land was not just property it was life.

The economic system that emerged, rooted in cheap African labour and resource extraction, continues to haunt Zimbabwe. Even after independence in 1980, land remained largely in settler hands, prompting the Fast-Track Land Reform Programme of 2000. Though vilified by the West, this programme represented a radical decolonial act an effort to reverse a century of theft and restore dignity through land justice.

Following land reform, Zimbabwe became a pariah in the Western world. The US, Britain, and the EU imposed economic sanctions under the guise of promoting ‘democracy and human rights’. In reality, these sanctions were and remain instruments of economic warfare designed to punish a formerly colonized people for asserting sovereignty.

Sanctions have crippled Zimbabwe’s economy cutting off international aid, access to credit, and trade but they have also laid bare the enduring power of neo-colonialism. As Frantz Fanon warned, decolonisation is not complete until economic, psychological, and cultural sovereignty are reclaimed.

Western powers, unable to stomach black self-determination, use global institutions like the IMF and World Bank to force African states back into dependency. These institutions demand austerity, privatisation, and open markets effectively recolonising through debt and economic blackmail.

The psychological grip of colonial religion remains one of the most enduring legacies of imperial conquest. Today, many Zimbabweans continue to embrace Eurocentric forms of Christianity that demonise African spirituality, discourage political consciousness, and teach obedience to oppressive systems.

The enduring presence of missionaries now repackaged as ‘born again’ and ‘prosperity gospel’ preachers perpetuates Leopold’s original plan. Churches collect tithes from the poor while preaching submission. The colonial message remains: “Happy are the poor . . . for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

As noted in the document, African Christians have been conditioned not to resist but to ‘lie down for the manna’. Meanwhile, their counterparts in the Global North, even when religious, are taught to fight for their nations and arm themselves against tyranny.

To confront these colonial continuities, Zimbabwe must fully embrace pan-Africanism and decoloniality. Figures like Kwame Nkrumah, Amílcar Cabral, and Thomas Sankara taught us that liberation is not just political, it must be economic, cultural, and spiritual.

Zimbabwe’s liberation was part of the broader African anti-colonial struggle. The dream was not merely flag independence, but African unity, socialism, and self-determination. That dream remains unrealised, but not unreachable.

Pan-Africanism teaches that Africa’s struggles are interconnected. Zimbabwe’s land question is tied to Congo’s resource plunder, to Palestine’s resistance, to Haiti’s revolution. Only through unity and revolutionary consciousness can we undo the colonial chains both visible and invisible.

The struggle for Zimbabwean liberation did not end in 1980. It continues in the classroom, in the Church, in the media, in economic policies, and in international relations. The weapons of colonialism have evolved from guns to banks, from chains to theology but the mission remains: to control the African mind, body, and land.

King Leopold’s letter is not just a historical artifact it is a mirror. It reveals the deep architecture of empire and the urgent need for African self-recovery. Zimbabwe’s path forward must be one of cultural reclamation, spiritual decolonisation, and revolutionary pan-Africanism.

To truly be free, Zimbabwe and all of Africa must reject the gospel of empire and rediscover the spirit of Chimurenga. Only then will we break the cross and the crown, and build a continent where black power, black pride, and black liberation reign.