The Church of England is facing a long overdue reckoning in Africa. Its leader, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, announced his resignation in November after an independent review highlighted his failure to report lawyer John Smyth, a frequent child abuser, to authorities.
Smyth was found to have physically, sexually and psychologically abused more than 100 boys and young men over a period of four decades at Church of England summer camps in England, South Africa and my home country of Zimbabwe. He died in Cape Town, South Africa in 2018 at the age of 77 without ever being held accountable.
The independent report into Smyth’s alleged crimes and the church’s attempts to cover them up makes for harrowing reading.
His “appalling” abuse of boys in England was identified by the church as early as 1982, the review says, but he was neither exposed to the public nor brought to account by authorities. Instead, he was encouraged to leave the country and move to Zimbabwe without making a police report. He is believed to have physically and sexually abused at least 80 boys in the camps he ran there in the 1990s.
Perhaps his most horrific crime occurred in December 1992 in Marondera, just outside Harare. A 16-year-old boy named Guide Nyachure drowned under mysterious circumstances in a camp run by Smyth. Smyth was originally charged with involuntary manslaughter, but the case was mysteriously dropped after dragging on, making little progress and making many mistakes by investigators. Smyth eventually moved to South Africa without facing accountability for his alleged role in Nyachure’s death.
The abuse Smyth inflicted on boys in a supposedly nurturing religious learning and growth environment was, unfortunately, not an anomaly. During the years that Smyth worked in my country, clergy abuse of children appears to have been widespread in many other areas. I first became vaguely aware of allegations of abuse at my Catholic boarding school in 1989-90, when I was a student at the Jesuit-run St. Ignatius of Loyola College near Harare. There were rumors about what some priests were doing to the younger boys. But no one spoke openly about it or tried to do anything about it.
I learned the true extent of clergy abuse in Catholic schools in Zimbabwe years later when I began researching a newly completed novel about abuse in a fictional Catholic boarding school. As part of my research, I spoke directly to some of the boys, now men, who said they attended my old school and two other elite Jesuit schools in Zimbabwe – St. George’s College and St. Francis Xavier, popularly known as Kutama known – had been mistreated. They reported horrific abuses inflicted on young, vulnerable boys with impunity.
In my interviews, the names of three priests were mentioned most often. I learned that, as was the case with Smyth and the Anglican Church, the Catholic Church placed these men in different environments to shield them from responsibility. I was told that one of the three, two old boys who said they had witnessed the rape of a little boy he had picked up on the street in Harare, was eventually transferred to Mbare, one of Zimbabwe’s poorest townships. He is said to have found more victims there.
To date, only one of these three men has been tried and convicted for his crimes against children and can therefore be named in this article: James Chaning-Pearce.
In 1997, Chaning-Pearce was sentenced to three years in prison for seven counts of indecent assault on boys at a Jesuit school in Lancashire, England. However, the Catholic Church played no role in bringing Chaning-Pearce to justice. He was only brought to justice because a former student at St George’s School in Zimbabwe, who was abused by Chaning-Pearce during his time there, identified him in Australia. He learned that the priest had been named as part of an investigation into historical abuse at the Lancashire school and alerted British authorities. An investigation had found that he had indeed abused children and he was duly extradited from Australia, tried, convicted and sentenced in England. To date, Chaning-Pearce has never been held accountable for his alleged abuse of children in Zimbabwe
An acute tragedy of clergy abuse in Zimbabwe is that Catholic schools such as St. Ignatius, St. George’s and Kutama attracted some of the brightest children from across the country, many on scholarships. Countless children from poorer families saw these schools as their best chance to make something of themselves. It is heartbreaking to know that so many of them did not receive the education and care they were promised, but instead were subjected to horrific abuse.
There must be a reckoning for the Catholic and Anglican churches in Africa, as well as in the United States and Europe. Just as elsewhere, the Anglican and Catholic churches must launch comprehensive investigations into historical sexual abuse in their schools in Zimbabwe and elsewhere in Africa. African victims, like victims in other parts of the world, deserve, if not justice, then accountability.
When Archbishop Welby announced his resignation over the mishandling of the Smyth abuse scandal, he said he hoped his decision to resign made clear “how seriously the Church of England understands the need for change and our deep commitment to creating a safer Church.” “.
In 2018, the head of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis, also fully acknowledged and apologized for his church’s failures to respond to clergy abuse.
In an unprecedented letter to all Catholics in the world, he promised that no effort would be spared to prevent clerical sexual abuse and its cover-up.
“The heartbreaking pain of these victims, which cries out to heaven, has long been ignored, concealed or silenced,” the pope wrote. “With shame and remorse, we as an ecclesial community recognize that we were not where we should have been, that we failed to act in a timely manner, despite knowing the extent and severity of the damage inflicted on so many lives . We didn’t take care of the little ones; We let them down.”
It is a great comfort and relief to see that, after decades of silence and attempted cover-ups, the Catholic and Anglican Churches are finally admitting the mistakes of the past and promising to take better action to protect children in the future. But so far their remorse appears to be directed exclusively at white victims of clergy abuse in the West.
However, children in Zimbabwe and across Africa suffered just as much at the hands of predatory priests as their white peers in England, Ireland and the United States. Churches must act quickly and meaningfully to acknowledge their pain and offer these broken boys who are now men a chance for justice. Otherwise one would say that the victims of clergy abuse do not matter as long as they are black Africans.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
