It is well known that European colonial conquest and rule in Africa, generally from the 1890s to 1960s, could not have taken place without the active cooperation and participation of Africans as security force personnel. When most African countries were becoming independent in the 1960s, African nationalist historians portrayed the African response to colonial subjugation in terms of either heroic resistance or traitorous collaboration. Although more recent historians would usually reject this as over simplification, these views persist in broader African society, which makes the study of African colonial police or military service a potentially delicate topic. This is even more apparent in the case of Zimbabwe, where the African nationalist armed struggle against settler colonialism during the late 1960s and 1970s, a time when most other African countries were already independent, is very much within living memory and African nationalist views of history remain highly politicized. As such, the experience of African soldiers and police during the colonial period has received attention from historians of many countries in West and East Africa, but not from those of Zimbabwe.

The history of African colonial soldiers and police is interesting because of the many contradictions inherent in their lives. They originated from a subject and exploited African community, yet they provided the colonial state with its coercive power and enforced discriminatory laws. In the case of a settler society like colonial Zimbabwe, there were other ambiguities.