I don't know much beyond the vague outlines but this article from liberation news gives a pretty solid description of the Mugabe era and his complexities.

https://www.liberationnews.org/preliminary-notes-apparent-coup-zimbabwe/

The settler-colonial period was marked by the dispossession of land from Africans and the development of a mining sector, worked, in large part, by Africans. If not working in the mines they were primarily confined to “communal areas” where they were crowded into low quality land and essentially were maintained as a reserve population for the mining interests and large white-owned commercial farms. Outrage at these social conditions propelled the anti-colonial liberation struggle.

The Lancaster House Accords preserved this basic economic structure, in exchange for Black majority rule. In other words, the economic domination of the country by Western mining capital and white farmers remained. So while Zimbabwe made impressive gains in areas such as education, ultimately the economically subordinated position of the Black population was not resolved.

This ultimately led Mugabe to dramatically reverse course in the early 2000s. From below there was a mass movement of land invasions in the countryside among dispossessed Black Zimbabweans, and ZANU-PF in turn initiated “fast track land reform” seizing land from whites and redistributing it to the Black population. While the press in the Western imperial centers howled, in truth this was a historically legitimate act of social justice–reparations for colonialism–which solidified ZANU-PF’s popular credibility. The ruling party was confronted by an opposition, by contrast, that contained some popular elements, but was largely supported by white dominated rural areas and the overall settler colonial economy.

This brought on deep ire from Western imperialism which slapped severe sanctions on Zimbabwe and overall tried to sabotage the economy. The effort to force ZANU-PF from power or to reverse course ultimately failed. ZANU-PF was able to win elections in 2008 and 2013, not without some controversy, because the opposition had no real strategy for dealing with the settler-colonial legacy.

...

In other words, a new and different economic and social composition has developed in the country. However the country retains its essential capitalist character. ZANU-PF has never attempted to transcend capitalism, and even its recent turn on land reform was only radical in the relative sense that it decisively departed from the norm in Southern Africa. A key goal of imperialism in this region has been to prevent any land reform that could disrupt the settler-colonial ownership structures that underpin the extractive and exploitative relationship with Western corporations.

If anything, the hatred from imperialist nations towards Zimbabwe is a profound statement about neo-colonialism. They have worked to prevent a rearrangement that could allow Southern African nations to be more independent and significant players in the world economy, even on a capitalist basis.

All this has to be taken into account in the present situation. While the land reform has been much more successful than Western observers put forward, without a doubt the overall economy is stagnating and the lack of investment, inputs, marketing support and the like has highly limited the possibilities in the country.

They just beat Ireland 2-1 in a cricket series.

So in October of 2021 the People’s School for Marxist-Leninist Studies here in the USA hosted a guest speaker from the ZCP. Very interesting dude. It seems that the audio is lost though. The ZCP website is down too.

Peeps here recommended the :wtyp: episode on Rhodesia, definitely helped me gain some fluency with the whole thing