INTRODUCTION

Zimbabwe last carried out an execution in 2005, indicating that the country is now de facto abolitionist. A future execution seems unlikely, particularly after a new constitution in 2013 prohibited mandatory death sentences and greatly restricted the scope of capital punishment. Several pending constitutional challenges look likely to restrict capital punishment still further. Nonetheless, Zimbabwe's democracy has a troubled history and the last decade saw a massive economic contraction unique on the continent. If death penalty abolition is correlated to wealth or democratization, then the differences between retentionist Botswana, a middle income democracy, and neighboring Zimbabwe, a low income country with an implicitly violent history of dominant-party rule, are stark and would seem to contradict such a correlation.

At least part of the reason for this difference is that the death penalty in Zimbabwe has a troubled history, quite different from Botswana. In the precolonial era, the Shona people generally did not practice capital punishment, although the more centralized Ndebele kingdom did. While British colonizers enforced the death penalty infrequently, the punishment became a tool of political repression and control during the era of white settler rule from 1965 to 1980. African nationalists could be subject to secret executions without fair trial guarantees during the war of liberation. At independence, Zimbabwe inherited a draconian security framework that took some time to dismantle, occasionally used against political opponents. By the time a new constitution was installed in 2013, after a decade of economic mismanagement and political manipulation, Zimbabwe's international posture on capital punishment opened to the possibility of abolition.

THE DEATH PENALTY IN PRECOLONIAL ZIMBABWE

Precolonial histories are subject to the limitations of oral histories and the reinvention of tradition, and in few places is history as contested as in Zimbabwe. The Shona people did not practice the death penalty for murder, believing that taking another person's life would cause his spirit to return to torment the living.