It is remarkable for Britain to be visited by a saint. But that was surely our good fortune last week, when Pius Ncube, the Archbishop of Bulawayo, passed through London. This gentle and soft-spoken former goatherd is a man of great holiness. In a country where churchmen have kept quiet, Ncube has consistently spoken out with extraordinary courage and firmness against the near-genocide that Robert Mugabe is visiting upon the Zimbabwean people.
Week after week, from the pulpit of Bulawayo Cathedral, Ncube uses his sermons to make a Christian protest against the torture, intimidation, rape, murders and forced starvation that are part of the daily rigours of Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF regime. When the Australian cricket team came to Bulawayo to play in the cricket World Cup, inevitably it was Ncube who led the protest from within the ground.
The response from Mugabe has been predictable. Ncube has been subject to death threats, abuse and threatening visits from the authorities. His phone is tapped, and he is followed everywhere by secret police. He is painted as an ogre figure in the government-controlled press. Every action he takes is wilfully misinterpreted. When he made a pastoral visit to Khami Prison in his diocese, the Bulawayo Chronicle claimed that afterwards there was a ‘surprising increase in homosexual pornography’ at the penitentiary.
His stand is made more extraordinary by the contrast with the inertia of most Zimbabwean churchmen. Though there are some distinguished individual exceptions, the baleful fact remains that both the Anglican and the Roman Catholic churches have preferred either to remain silent or to work within the Zanu-PF framework. Indeed, some of the most prominent churchmen do not merely bite their tongues; they are active cheerleaders of Robert Mugabe.
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