The Church of England faces a long overdue judgment in Africa. Its leader, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, announced his resignation in November after an independent review drew attention to his failure to report lawyer John Smyth, a prolific child abuser, to authorities.
Smyth was found to have physically, sexually and mentally abused more than 100 boys and young men over 40 years at Church of England summer camps in the UK, South Africa and my home country of Zimbabwe. He died in Cape Town, South Africa in 2018 at the age of 77 without any charges being given.
The independent review of Smyth’s alleged crimes and the church’s attempts to cover them up makes for harrowing reading.
His “appalling” abuse of boys in Britain was confirmed by the church as early as 1982, but he was never exposed to the public or held accountable by authorities. Instead, he moved to Zimbabwe after being advised to leave the country without being referred to the police. He is believed to have physically and sexually abused at least 80 boys at the camp he ran there in the 1990s.
Perhaps his most heinous crime occurred in December 1992 in Marondera, outside Harare. A 16-year-old boy named Guide Nyachure drowned under suspicious circumstances at a camp presided over by Smyth. Smyth was initially charged with manslaughter, but the case was mysteriously dismissed after it dragged on for so long with little progress and many mistakes on the part of investigators. Smyth eventually moved to South Africa and took no responsibility for his role in Nyachure’s death.
The abuse Smyth inflicted on the boys in their upbringing, religious learning, and upbringing was unfortunately not anomalous. During Smyth’s time in our country, child abuse by clergy appears to have been widespread in many other settings as well. I first became vaguely aware of allegations of abuse within a Catholic boarding school in 1989-90. At the time, I was attending the Jesuit-run University of St. Ignatius of Loyola near Harare. Rumors abounded about what some priests had done to young boys. But no one spoke publicly about it or tried anything to stop it.
I learned about the true extent of clergy abuse in Zimbabwean Catholic schools several years later when I began research for a novel I had just completed about abuse at a fictional Catholic boarding school. As part of my research, I spoke of abuse at the school I attended and at two other prestigious Jesuit schools in Zimbabwe: St George’s College and St Francis Xavier, popularly known as Kutama. They described the horrific abuse inflicted with impunity on young, vulnerable boys.
What was mentioned the most during my interview were three priests. I have found that, as was the case with Smith and the Anglican Church, the Catholic Church protects these people from accountability by moving them to other environments. One of the three people who said they saw two boys raping a young boy on a Harare street eventually moved to Mbare, one of Zimbabwe’s poorest villages, it has been heard. He reportedly found more victims there.
To date, only one of these three has been tried and convicted of crimes against children, so this article may name him: James Chaning-Pearce.
In 1997, Channing-Pearce was found guilty of seven counts of sexual assault against boys at a Jesuit school in Lancashire, England, and sentenced to three years in prison. But the Catholic Church played no role in bringing Channing-Pierce to trial. He faces liability after Australia confirmed a former pupil at St George’s School in Zimbabwe had been abused while at Channing-Pearce. He alerted British authorities after learning the priest had been named in an investigation into historical abuse at a school in Lancashire. The investigation found that he had in fact abused children and was duly extradited from Australia to be tried, convicted and sentenced in the UK. To date, Channing-Pierce has not been held accountable for any of the child abuse allegations in Zimbabwe.
The serious tragedy of clergy abuse in Zimbabwe is that Catholic schools such as St. Ignatius, St. George’s and Kutama attract the brightest children from all over the country, many of whom receive scholarships. It means you are receiving it. Many children from poor families saw this school as their best opportunity to make something of themselves. It is heartbreaking that so many of them do not receive the education and care they were promised and instead suffer horrific abuse.
Just as in the United States and Europe, the Catholic and Anglican churches in Africa must be judged. As they have done elsewhere, the Anglican and Catholic churches must launch a full investigation into historic sexual abuse in schools in Zimbabwe and other parts of Africa. Victims in Africa deserve accountability, if not justice, just as much as victims in other parts of the world.
Archbishop Welby announces his resignation over his mishandling of the Smith abuse scandal, as his decision to step down becomes clear “how seriously the Church of England understands the need for change and our profound commitment to making the Church safer” He said he hoped.
In 2018, Pope Francis, head of the Catholic Church, similarly fully acknowledged and apologized for the church’s failure to respond to clergy abuse.
In an unprecedented letter to Catholics around the world, he pledged to spare no effort to prevent clerical sexual abuse and its cover-up.
“The heartbreaking suffering of these victims, who cry out to heaven, has long been ignored and kept quiet,” the Pope wrote. “Through shame and repentance, we acknowledge as a church community that we were not where we should have been, that we did not take action in a timely manner, and that we failed to realize the scale and severity of the damage done to countless lives. We did not take care of the children. “We abandoned them.”
After decades of silence and attempted cover-ups, it is a great comfort and relief to see the Catholic and Anglican churches finally acknowledging their past mistakes and committing to do better to protect children in the future. But so far their repentance appears to have focused only on white victims of clergy abuse in the West.
But children in Zimbabwe and across Africa have suffered from predatory clergy just as much as their white peers in Britain, Ireland and the United States. The Church must take swift, meaningful action to acknowledge their suffering and provide an opportunity for justice for these broken boys, now men. To fail to do so would be to say that it does not matter as long as the victims of clergy abuse are black Africans.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
