Chapter 3: Fighting Colonial Identities: Zimbabwean Independence and the Ongoing Advocacy Against Colonial Impositions of Gender and Sexuality

This paper seeks to analyse how Zimbabwean movements for independence and feminism have challenged and dismantled the colonial construction of rigid binaries of gender and sexuality imposed on Zimbabwean societies. When European colonisers established their dominance in Zimbabwe in the late 19th century, they imposed a hierarchical social order defined by Christianity, heteropatriarchal family structures and strict binaries of male/female and masculine/feminine. Indigenous African conceptualisations of multiple genders and fluid sexualities were marginalised and suppressed. This deeply entrenched a colonial legacy that structured post-independence Zimbabwean society according to Western norms. Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle in the 1970s was, therefore, not just a fight against white minority rule but also a challenge to colonial constructions of identity. The Zimbabwean Independence ushered in new possibilities for recognising non-conforming genders and sexualities. However, colonial impositions of the patriarchal nuclear family and evangelist morality remained strongly institutionalised. Contemporary Zimbabwean feminisms have thus continued resisting cisheteropatriarchal power through advocating for LGBTQ+ rights, centring non-binary identities and embracing pre-colonial African epistemologies. It draws from postcolonial and decolonial theories to decentre cisheteropatriarchal norms and recognise the fluid expressions of identity that existed pre-colonisation. This paper analyses oral histories, culturally specific terms and the work of organisations like GALZ to argue Zimbabwe is progressively dismantling colonial gender binaries and making space for the fluid diversity suppressed under colonialism. Overall, it presents Zimbabwean independence and feminism as an ongoing decolonial process of recentring indigenous ontologies of self beyond the binaries imposed by colonial regimes.