Holy Men and Rural Communities in Zimbabwe, 1970–1980

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.