Death penalty: how Zimbabwe reached the point of abolition – podcast

 Zimbabwe is on the cusp of abolishing the death penalty after its Death Penalty Abolition Bill was approved by the Senate on December 12. The bill is now sitting on the desk of Zimbabwe’s president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, a known opponent of the death penalty, waiting for his assent. Once it does, it will become the 127th country in the world to abolish the death penalty, and the 27th on the African continent.

In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we speak to two experts on the death penalty who explain how Zimbabwe got here and what abolition means for both the country, and the continent.

The death penalty was brought to Zimbabwe by colonisation in the 1880s, first by Cecil Rhodes and the British South Africa company and then, from 1923 as a self-governing British colony. According to Carolyn Hoyle, director of the Death Penalty Research Unit at the University of Oxford, before then people were generally not sentenced to death. She explains:

 "The traditional idea in the region … Ubuntu which focuses on peace and reparation typically guided responses to serious crime. And there was also this idea of compensation for murder … that the offender’s community would transfer property, maybe a goat, sometimes actually, slightly concerningly, a woman, to the victim’s community.“

But with British colonial rule came the statue of capital punishment, by hanging. After 1965, when Ian Smith’s minority white government declared a Unilateral Declaration of Independence over Rhodesia and a 15-year civil war ensued, the number of death sentences rose from 28 in 1965 to 71 in 1968. After Robert Mugabe became prime minister of an independent Zimbabwe in 1980, the number of executions began to decline significantly.  

The last man to be hanged was a convicted murderer, Mandlenkosi Masina, in July 2005. Since then it has become a de-facto abolitionist country.

The route to abolition

In 2017, Parvais Jabbar, who runs an NGO called the Death Penalty Project as well as being visiting professor of practice alongside Hoyle at the University of Oxford, commissioned research to find out the level of support for the death penalty in Zimbabwe. They found that 61% of 1,200 people surveyed supported the death penalty, but that of those in support, 80% agreed that "if the government were to decide to abolish the death penalty, we would accept that”.

In subsequent research in 2019, Hoyle also found a high level of support among political, religious and civil society leaders, for abolition. Mnangagwa, who became president in 2017 after Mugabe’s death, has also long been a vocal opponent of the death penalty. In 1965, he was convicted of sabotage during the fight for independence and sentenced to death. He avoided being hung because he was deemed too young, but he spent ten years in prison and the experience shaped his views on capital punishment.

 Just before the outbreak of COVID-19, there had been some debates in parliament about the death penalty, but any progress towards abolition took a back seat during the pandemic. Then in September 2023, Jabbar and Hoyle were invited to Harare to meet with their local partners, a charity called Veritas Zimbabwe, and other politicians sympathetic to the issue. A private members’ bill was brought forward by an opposition MP called  Edwin Mushoriwa. The cabinet then approved the bill in February 2024, and after making its way through various parliamentary stages, the senate finally approved the bill in December.

Once Zimbabwe does abolish the death penalty, it will join Ghana, Zambia and the Central African Republic in doing so in recent years.

Jabbar says this reflects a growing African-centric approach to abolition, rather than one that’s influenced by the west. He also sees it as being a reckoning with colonial-era laws that remain on the statute books.

“ So many of these jurisdictions would say, we never had the death penalty until colonial rule. We used to deal with it in a different way. So I think they are rejecting it as a sort of colonial-era punishment and trying to find something different.”

Listen to the The Conversation Weekly podcast to hear the full interview with Hoyle and Jabbar.

This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Gemma Ware and Mend Mariwany. Sound design was by Michelle Macklem, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl.

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Parvais Jabbar is the Executive Director of an international legal NGO specialising in death penalty issues. It is a not for profit organisation and is funded by a number of foundations as well as receiving support from UK Foreign Commonwealth & Development Office. Carolyn Hoyle does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.