allAfrica.com: Zimbabwe: Kunonga Resists Anti-State Stance in Zim (Page 1 of 2)

"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.

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