Residents of Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, sometimes recount a familiar postcolonial experience of being “independent but not free”. Within this context, a group of Baptist Christians in the city are engaged in their own debates about the nature of freedom as a spiritual and ethical reality. Their religious account challenges a reigning liberal and Eurocentric view of freedom in some scholarship and public discourse, which presumes that freedom is the capacity to choose between alternatives.
Drawing on 15 months of fieldwork with a network of middle-class Baptist Christians, I show how Zimbabwean Baptists develop alternative visions of freedom through the urgency of their daily moral deliberations as religious practitioners. Adhering to a normative, relational freedom, their accounts enliven critiques of freedom as individual choice. By invoking both Augustinian theology and an ethic of ubuntu, their religious visions of freedom shed critical light on current discourses about the nature of postcolonial freedoms.