Harare — "we are not going to have the remains of the pioneers interred in the cloisters trampled upon by the feet of terrorists," said the Dean of the Anglican Cathedral in the then Salisbury. This was in response to a request by the Zimbabwean nationalists to hold a thanksgiving prayer at the cathedral following the end of the war of independence.

Yet the same Anglican Church had previously, at its mission stations in the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe, nurtured and encouraged young upcoming nationalists, some of whom later joined the armed struggle and became "terrorists".

Therein lies the duplicity of the attitude of the Anglican Church towards the liberation of Zimbabwe by its indigenous people, and the role it has played in that struggle over the years. In the immediate sense this equivocation is attributable to the personalities and psyches of specific persona in control at a given time and place. It has little to do with the Anglican Christian doctrine per se.

Thus the Anglican Church has had, on one hand, persons like Reverend Arthur Lewis, Rector of Rusape, and others like him who were rabid racists and gave succour to Rhodesian white racists and murderers. They upheld the false claim that the domination and rule of blacks by whites was God-ordained and actually for the blacks' own benefit.

According to them the whites were here to "civilise" and develop the Africans. It was the savage and barbaric streak in the Africans that made some of them resist white rule.

On the other hand, we had liberal white Anglicans like Bishop Paget, Father Trevor Huddlestone, and Reverend John Stowell, who inspired and facilitated the work by nationalists like George Nyandoro, James Chikerema and Benjamin Burombo.

Father Keeble Prosser of St Augustine's Mission actually encouraged pupils to take a stand against racist oppression, resulting in some of them going to join the armed struggle.

However, the duplicity of the role of the Anglican Church in Zimbabwe has its roots in the fact that it is not the ordinary protestant religion. Among the British, our erstwhile colonisers, it is the church of the state, hence the name, Church of England.

The state and the church in England have an intrinsic mutually supportive relationship. That relationship is valued, honoured and held in high esteem by both of parties. Thus while the former British prime minister, Tony Blair, long decided that he would rather be Roman Catholic than Anglican, he remained in the latter for the whole of his term as prime minister. Blair was only free to leave the Church of England and return to Catholicism after relinquishing the position of prime minister.

British clerics in the Anglican Church have always been torn between giving greater allegiance to the Anglican Christian doctrine as opposed to giving it to the state, which is a colonising power, whose interests are rarely in keeping with the major tenets of the Christian religion. Most of the time the Church of England has easily chosen to stand by the state.

It is for this reason that Archbishop Nolbert Kunonga of the Anglican Church of the Province of Zimbabwe has repeatedly resisted efforts by Reverend Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to persuade him to adopt an anti-state stance in Zimbabwe.

The umbilical relationship between the then British colony of Rhodesia and the Anglican Church is well symbolised by the physical structures of the Cathedral of Saint Mary and All Saints and its auxiliary buildings that lie adjacent to the House of Parliament, to which they were internally well connected.

When Dr Kunonga beat the former rector of Greendale Anglican Parish, former Rhodesian soldier, Timothy Neil, to become Bishop of the Diocese of Harare, remnants of the Rhodesian racist elements in the diocese immediately sensed trouble.

They were right. Bishop Kunonga immediately moved to break ranks with the "progressive" church elements, which were against the Government's land reform programme. Not only did Kunonga support the land reclamation project, he went further and quoted from the Bible to support the land reform programme which returned the land to its rightful original black owners. He went even further by tampering with "the remains of the pioneers interred in the cloisters", and those of the police dogs used by their descendants to terrorise blacks during the colonial period. What cheek! For them Dr Kunonga had committed the cardinal sin. From then on it was war and woe to him!

However, while his local adversaries engaged Dr Kunonga in various skirmishes over his perceived weaknesses and shortcomings, some real, others imagined; the Western church and even state establishments did not stop trying to court the bishop.

Archbishop Williams went to great lengths to try and "turn" Dr Kunonga during their meetings in South Africa, but he got nowhere. Following that, representatives of Western establishments in Harare sent or escorted emissaries to talk to the bishop.

The carrot of promised material aid and assistance was waved in front of Dr Kunonga's eyes. What did he think about all the suffering that the Zimbabwean masses were going through? When and how did he think it was going to end? These diplomats had come just "to exchange views" and "share ideas", they said.

Throughout all this Dr Kunonga remained unmoved from his stance that he would not be part of anything that might be even remotely anti-State. He remained unwavering in his support for the land reform programme. This man might have shown "greed" by accepting a farm under the land allocation exercise; he has definitely not been greedy for foreign assistance at the cost of his principles.

Those who accuse Dr Kunonga of being a "Mugabe crony" are not aware of the strong nationalist ethic that pervades his family's history. His father actually beat up a young white colonial official who dared assault his human dignity at a diptank where the official was taking stock of how many head of animals each household had. This was for control purposes under the Animal Husbandry Act, which allowed Africans to possess only a small number of cattle. This was at a time President Mugabe was probably still a primary school teacher, so the older Kunonga could not possibly have been a Mugabe crony.

But going back to an even earlier period in the history of his clan, we find that Dr Kunonga's great-great- grandfather, Chiwashire (Chief Mtekedzi), from whom the Archbishop is the fourth generation, was beheaded at about the same time that Chingaira Makoni met the same fate at the hands of the colonialists. Immediately following independence, Dr Kunonga was known to adopt positions well to the left of President Mugabe on some national issues.

Well before his fallout with the Church of the Province of Central Africa, Dr Kunonga was already advocating an Anglican Communion whose doctrine and canons are more responsive and sensitive to Zimbabwean realities and cultures. An independent Anglican communion, allied to other communions of similar thought and disposition, self-reliant and not dependent on outside forces that can hold it hostage, was always his aim.

It is in the above context that we view the split in the Anglican community of Zimbabwe today, following his "dismissal" by the Church of the Province of Central Africa, and his attempted replacement by Retired Bishop Bakare.

A split which originally, and on the surface of it, was about homosexuality, but which has rapidly assumed totally different dimensions, with a lot of bearing on the on-going battle for the control of Zimbabwe and its resources between imperialists and their surrogates on one hand, and the indigenous people of this country on the other.

Bishop Bakare is quoted in an article that claims a repressive environment marked by intimidation and organised violence against perceived Government opponents renders this week's harmonised elections unlikely to be free and fair.

Alleges the former bishop: "We are experiencing chaos in the country which is promoting anarchy. The environment of lawlessness is destroying us.

"The country has no respect for individuals. Those who are supposed to bring peace to the country are perpetuating violence."

Bishop Bakare's remarks, coming during a period when even the opposition is acknowledging that the environment is generally peaceful and all parties are campaigning without let or hindrance, are rather baffling. The main opposition has gone as far as commending the police for being available when their security services are required and taking appropriate action against perpetrators of violence, though they insist the police should do more.

It is in this context that the remarks by Bishop Bakare regarding "chaos", "anarchy" and "lawlessness" in the country, almost immediately followed by an injection of £50 000 into his project, becomes quite remarkable.

That money, coming as it is largely from the British coffers of Lambeth Palace, which was recently reported to have made frantic efforts to turn Archbishop Kunonga against the State, raises eyebrows. This is especially so in view of British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown's recent statement that he is increasing financial assistance to opposition groups in Zimbabwe.

We believe that if some members of the Anglican community were aware of the evil axis that links homosexuality-British funding-and-the-colonialist Rhodesian project, they would behave differently from the way they are behaving now. Some day soon they will know. For now we can only hope our brothers will not sell their souls for British pounds sterling.

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