Today, Afrikaans is spoken by a small minority of Zimbabweans, less than one percent of the population and the number of whom has declined significantly since 1980.

[3][4][5] Today's, Afrikaans speakers in Zimbabwe are typically recent Afrikaner immigrants from South Africa or their descendants.

Afrikaners first arrived in what would become Southern Rhodesia in the early 1890s, recruited to be among the first pioneers by Cecil Rhodes, who sought to bring their agricultural expertise for the new region.

A larger wave of migrants flowed into the country following a depression after the second Boer War, mostly from the Cape and Orange Free State.

"[7] L. M. Foggin, the colonial director of education, warned in an official report: "I am convinced that if the concession of mother-tongue instruction were allowed in the schools of Rhodesia, it would result at once in Dutch districts in the teaching to the children of characteristic anti-British and anti-Imperial principles of the Nationalist party.

"[7] In spite of this issue, Afrikaners assimilated fairly well into the larger English-speaking white population, and were generally seen as loyal to the Southern Rhodesian government.

The history of Afrikaner migration and their contributions were long ignored, by Rhodesian authorities, who feared being swamped by bijwoners or poor undesirables from South Africa, and thus heavily restricted their entry into the country and discriminated against them socially.

[2] Post-independence Zimbabwe has had little incentive to teach and maintain Afrikaans, and tensions in the 1980s with the apartheid government only worsened relations between the two countries, hastening the decline of the language.

[2] As a result, today, most Zimbabwean-born Afrikaners tend to be mostly English speaking and thus lumped together with the much larger anglophone white population, especially in the eyes of black and younger Zimbabweans who know little of the colonial era.

Indeed, persons of Afrikaner heritage in the media, such as Andy Blignaut, Dirk Viljoen and Mark Vermeulen tend to be anglophones who speak Zimbabwean English, with general or cultivated accents, making them appear assimilated in the eyes of the public.