Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe is overwhelmingly Christian, around 85 percent per most estimates including Pew Research's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020, spread across mainline Protestant, Catholic, Pentecostal and African Independent Churches, alongside a substantial minority who blend Christian practice with indigenous Shona and Ndebele traditional religion centered on ancestor veneration and the Mwari cult, a supreme-being tradition focused historically on the Matobo Hills shrines in the country's southwest.

The Great Zimbabwe ruins, a medieval stone city that gave the modern country its name and flourished from roughly the eleventh to fifteenth centuries, served religious as well as political functions for the Shona kingdom that built it, and the Mwari cult's oracular shrines in the Matobo Hills continued functioning as a regional pilgrimage and consultation network across ethnic and political boundaries into the colonial and postcolonial periods.

Christian missionary activity expanded significantly under British colonial rule from the 1890s, and African Independent Churches, including the Zion Christian Church and various Apostolic movements blending Pentecostal Christianity with prophecy, healing and elements of indigenous custom, grew rapidly through the twentieth century into some of the country's largest religious movements.

Sources Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020Pew Research Center with The God of the Matopo Hills: An Essay on the Mwari Cult in RhodesiaM. L. Daneel

Traditional Shona and Ndebele spirit mediums, believed to channel ancestral and territorial spirits, played a documented and widely discussed role in Zimbabwe's 1970s liberation war against white minority rule, with figures such as the medium Mbuya Nehanda, executed by colonial authorities in 1898 for an earlier uprising, becoming a lasting nationalist symbol later invoked by guerrilla fighters seeking legitimacy and, by some published ethnographic accounts, tactical guidance from mediums during the war itself.

Independent Zimbabwe's government under Robert Mugabe after 1980 generally respected religious freedom in law while periodically clashing with Christian church leaders, particularly Catholic bishops, over criticism of human rights abuses during the 1980s Gukurahundi killings in Matabeleland and later over land reform and economic policy. Zimbabwe's constitution guarantees freedom of religion and maintains no established church, and the country's African Independent and Apostolic churches, some of which reject conventional medicine in favor of faith healing, have at times drawn public health concern from authorities during disease outbreaks, illustrating a recurring tension between religious practice and state health policy in a religious landscape shaped as much by indigenous and independent African Christianity as by mission denominations.