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Holy Men and Rural Communities in Zimbabwe, 1970–1980
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
A good deal has been written about the response of the mission churches to the guerilla war in Zimbabwe. Much less has been written about their experience of it. Yet it has been persuasively argued that the real significance of the war for the churches lay not at the level of institutional pronouncements upon it but at the level of the participation of churchmen in the sufferings of local rural communities. The war was an embarassment to institutional spokesmen. In the early colonial past the leaders of the catholic and protestant churches in Southern Rhodesia had legitimated war, providing chaplains for the white columns that defeated the Ndebele in 1893 and suppressed the risings in 1896 and preaching the duty of the representatives of Christian civilisation to overthrow barbarism. By the 1960s some churchmen had come to condemn violence—both the institutional violence of the Rhodesian state and the revolutionary violence of the nationalist and liberation movements. As guerilla war spread in the 1970s, hardly any church spokesmen could move beyond this position. It became clearer and clearer that the majority of their African rural flocks supported the guerillas and even clearer that African rural Christians were suffering terribly in the violence of civil war. But no-one was able to articulate a theology appropriate to such a crisis.
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- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1983
References
1 Ranger, Shelagh, ’Theological Responses to Political Conflict in Rhodesia since U.D.I.‘ (Manchester Theology B.A. thesis May 1978)Google Scholar.
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4 Officer Commanding, Special Branch, to Secretary, Internal Affairs, 7 December 1974, file ‘Schools. St Theresa’s’, District Commissioner’s office, Rusape, Maltoni.
5 Ibid, ‘Report for week, Tuesday 20/4/76’.
6 Interview with Father Peter Turner, Umtali, 14 March 1981.
7 Report on St Benedict’s, Weya, 1977, Catholic Commission of Justice and Peace file ‘St Benedict’s’, CCJP Archives, Salisbury.
8 Interview with Comrade Believe (Miss Needmore Ndhlovu), Old Umtali, 9 March 1981.
9 Interview with Father Peter Turner, Umtali, 14 March 1981.
10 Interview with Father Vernon, St Killian’s, 15 February 1981. All other citations of Father Vernon are from this interview.
11 Interview with Father Kenny, St Barbara’s, 26 February 1981. All other citations of Father Kenny are from this interview.
12 ‘Report on Christe Mambo School and Convent’, May 1978, CCJP file ‘Guerilla Reports’, CCJP Archives, Salisbury.
13 Stephen Matewa to Guy Clutton Brock, 28 December 1976, Matewa Correspondence, Toriro.
14 Ibid, Stephen Matewa to Bishop of Mashonaland, 4 November 1978.
15 Ibid, Stephen Matewa to Pensions Officer, Salisbury, 24 July 1979.
16 Ibid, Stephen Matewa to Ci-ordinator, Christian Care, 3 and 29 August 1979.
17 Ibid, Stephen Matewa to Medical Co-ordinator, International Red Cross, 8 November 1979.
18 Ibid, Stephen Matewa to Dean of Salisbury, 2 November 1979.
19 Interview with Stephen Matewa, Toriro, 23 March 1981.
20 ‘Hopes and Aspirations of the Black Anglican Christians in the Independent Zimbabwe’, 9 July 1980, Matewa Papers, Toriro.
21 Buriro/Esizeni Reflection Centre seminar, September 26/27 1981.
22 Buriro/Esizeni Reflection Centre, Projects Investigation Report, July 1982.