After three months of intimidation by the ruling regime, Zimbabweans on Friday are to vote in a presidential run-off election. The Churches are the last defence against the power of the state, and here one of the foremost authorities on Zimbabwe examines the President's attempts to rein them in
Immediately before the March 2008 elections in Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe gave a sermon in the Apostolic Faith Mission church in Lobengula township, Bulawayo. All Churches in Zimbabwe, he said, must become Zimbabwean: "Independence means that power has come to the indigenous people of the country ... Our people must be able to head, even the old Churches and perhaps the new ones also. We want to see the Africanisation of the Church, which does not mean bringing an African God because there is only one universal God, but [which means] the running of the Church."
By Africanisation President Mugabe clearly meant Zimbabweanisation - he praised, for instance, the action of the rebel Anglican Bishop of Harare, Norbert Kunonga, for turning his old diocese into an independent province. In Zimbabwe, Mr Mugabe was saying, all Churches must be run by Zimbabweans; be independent of control or subsidy from outside; and be loyal to the Zimbabwean state and its revolution. Zimbabwe should go back to the old Reformation formula of one prince/one Church, except that it would now be one president/many Churches.
Mr Mugabe's aim is difficult to achieve. Every kind of Church in Zimbabwe is supranational. The Catholic Church is, of course, loyal to Rome. Before Kunonga's secession last year the Zimbabwean Anglican dioceses were part of the Province of Central Africa and subject to its authority. The other Zimbabwean dioceses still are. Evangelicals are in touch with hundreds of other Churches in North America and Europe. And even the most "African" of Churches in Zimbabwe, the white-robed Apostles of John Masowe and John Maranke, flourish in Mozambique, South Africa, Angola, Zambia and right up into East Africa. They, too, are transnational Churches.
All this is irritating to the Zimbabwe state. It means that Zimbabwean Churches have access to resources which they can distribute independently of the state. There have been several attempts either to stop or to demonise church relief. During Operation Murambatsvina in 2005, which involved the smashing down of hundreds of thousands of shacks and sheds in the townships, the police refused to allow any of the Churches to bring in and distribute relief from overseas on the ground that there were no victims. People who took shelter in churches were driven out in police raids. When, in reaction to this, African Evangelicals began to organise for political protest, the state Chronicle newspaper "discovered" a sinister plot for regime change. Under the guise of posting clergy to the rural areas, Evangelicals were placing American-trained agents who would use the pulpit to politicise their parishioners - all financed in this by American homosexuals and Satanists.
And this is the second reason why the Zimbabwean state needs to control the Churches. They are not only transnational but they are local. They are everywhere, responding and reporting. Mr Mugabe's Government has recently prohibited NGOs from operating in the rural areas. Few people can now enter the "no-go" zones of the countryside. But the Churches are there. Last year when the Zimbabwean Catholic bishops issued a devastating pastoral letter in English, the state press attacked it. But when the letter was translated into the vernaculars and began to be distributed to rural parishes, there was a much more violent reaction. Reports came in of gangs of militia invading churches, tearing up the pastoral letter, telling the priest that he must preach the religion of Robert Mugabe rather than that of Pius Ncube (then Archbishop of Bulawayo and Mr Mugabe's most outspoken critic), and sometimes assaulting and evicting the priest. Unconfirmed reports now say that, on the eve of the presidential run-off election between the Opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader Morgan Tsvangirai and Mr Mugabe scheduled for next Friday, 27 June, rural Catholic priests are being attacked again. So are other churchmen. The Standard of 3 May reported that an Assemblies of God church in northern Matabeleland has been closed down "as its resident pastor fled after being tortured by Zanu-PF supporters on suspicion that he was an MDC sympathiser".
The third reason for Mr Mugabe's desire to have "truly Zimbabwean" Churches is that the present ones behave "unpatriotically". They help his opponents and condemn his regime. In particular, they denounce the violence that has been unleashed since the declaration of the results of the March elections. In the last week of April the Evangelical Fellowship of Zimbabwe, the Zimbabwe Catholic Bishops' Conference and the Zimbabwe Council of Churches issued a statement in which they said that the country was on the brink of genocide, people were being "abducted, tortured and humiliated ... accused of campaigning or voting for the ‘wrong' party". At the end of May the Evangelical Fellowship and the Zimbabwe Women's National Prayer Task Force organised a huge prayer meeting on the outskirts of Harare. "As we pray today," Tawona Mtshiya, vice chairwoman of the Evangelical Fellowship, declared, "there are some fellow Zimbabweans who are hiding in mountains afraid to come down, fearing that they might be surrounded and attacked".
The state press takes the view that the Churches behave like this because they are transnational and not truly Zimbabwean. Mr Mugabe's press secretary, George Charamba, writing in the state-run Herald, launched an outspoken attack on Catholicism. It entered the country with imperialism, "killing for the Eucharist"; the colonial sword "taught the cross how to pacify and then govern the native through a rough and ready hand".
Mr Mugabe, still a Catholic, has not yet come to the point of repudiating the Pope. The Archbishop of Canterbury, though, has not been so fortunate. He is being described as a pseudo-pope who can indeed be repudiated. "Archbishop" Kunonga described himself in May 2006 as an incarnation of Luther, with Rowan Williams as the Pope, and Mugabe as Henry VIII. "Throughout history," he said, "the Anglican Church has been an extension of British colonialism".
Zimbabwe needed a new Reformation. Through Luther "Germany was saying Germany for the Germans and Henry VIII was also saying England should be ruled by the English - and it applies to our situation, too, that no aliens should rule".
The parallels with the Reformation are, indeed, uncanny. Henry VIII was able to reward his big men with the lands of the monasteries; Mugabe can reward his with the lands of the white commercial farmers. Kunonga has been given a farm.
Kunonga has been an iconoclast in the Zimbabwean context. His cathedral, in the heart of Harare, was built as a symbol of imperial rule. Dr Obediah Mazombwe's defence of Kunonga, published on 25 May 2008 in The Herald, remembers that when the new Mugabe regime asked that thanksgiving prayers be held in the cathedral at independence in 1980 the dean replied: "We are not going to have the remains of the pioneers interred in the cloisters trampled upon by the feet of terrorists." Rhodesian banners hung in the cathedral; the Rhodesian dead were commemorated there. Kunonga has swept most of this away. He also used fraud and intimidation to purge the black Anglican clergy.
But Mazombwe's key defence of Kunonga is that he "has repeatedly resisted efforts by the Archbishop of Canterbury to persuade him to adopt an anti-state stance in Zimbabwe". After all, "amongst the British, our erstwhile colonisers, [the Anglican Church] is the Church of the State". But Kunonga stands, writes Mazombwe, for "an independent Anglican communion ... not dependent on outside forces that can hold it hostage".
No wonder that Mugabe praised Kunonga in his election sermon. No wonder the police have been on Kunonga's side, assaulting his Anglican opponents when they gather for the Eucharist, guarding the locked doors of the cathedral behind which he rallies his own supporters. Meanwhile the early modern echoes of the controversy intensify as Kunonga and his followers have been given the "Greater Excommunication". The Zimbabwean press report protests by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York under the headline "UK ropes in Churches for regime change". On 29 May the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Archbishop of Cape Town appealed to the only international authority Mr Mugabe recognises - the United Nations. They told Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary General, of "their grave concern about the increasing violence of what appears to be a sustained campaign against the Anglican Church in Zimbabwe ... Harassment and intimidation is their daily bread".
Kunonga, of course, will not be at the Lambeth Conference nor at the Evangelical Anglican conference in Jerusalem. Like Mr Mugabe, he is an increasingly isolated man. It remains to be seen whether Zimbabwean voters in the presidential run-off endorse their joint vision of Zimbabwe as a self-reliant siege state.
