The Church of England is facing a long-running case in Africa. Its leader, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, announced his resignation in November after an independent review brought to his attention his failure to report to the authorities the lawyer John Smyth, who is a child abuser.
Smyth was found to have physically, sexually and psychologically abused more than 100 young men over 40 years at summer camps affiliated with the Church of England, in South Africa and in my country, Zimbabwe. He died in Cape Town, South Africa in 2018, at the age of 77, without giving an answer.
An independent review of Smyth’s alleged crimes, and the Church’s efforts to cover them up, makes for painful reading.
His “appalling” abuse of boys in England was noted by the Church in early 1982, the review found, but he was not exposed to the public and the authorities did not charge him. Instead, he was encouraged to leave the country for Zimbabwe without being handed over to the police. He is believed to have physically and sexually abused at least 80 boys at the camps he ran in the 1990s.
Perhaps his most heinous crime took place in Marondera, just outside Harare in December 1992. A 16-year-old boy named Guide Nyachure drowned under suspicious circumstances at a camp run by Smyth. Smyth was initially charged with involuntary manslaughter, but the case was inexplicably dropped after a long delay with little progress and many mistakes on the part of the investigators. Smyth eventually moved to South Africa, no longer answering for his role in Nyachure’s murder.
Smyth’s abuse of the boys in what they were supposed to be brought up in, religious places of learning and growth was unfortunately not a mistake. In the years that Smyth has been working in our country, the abuse of children by priests seems to be common in other places. I first became aware of allegations of abuse at my Catholic boarding school in 1989-90, when I was a student at the Jesuit-run College of St Ignatius of Loyola, near Harare. There were rumors of things that several priests did to little boys. Yet no one spoke openly about it or tried to do anything to stop it.
I learned about the true extent of clerical abuse in Catholic schools in Zimbabwe years later, when I began researching a novel I am currently finishing about abuse in a fictional Catholic school. As part of my research, I spoke directly to some of the boys, now men, who said they were abused at my old school, and at two other Jesuit high schools in Zimbabwe – St George’s College and St Francis Xavier popularly known as Kutama. They recount horrific abuses, inflicted on young, vulnerable boys with impunity.
During my conversations, the names of three priests were often mentioned. I found that, as was the case with Smyth and the Church of England, the Catholic Church moved these men in various places to protect them from accountability. I was told that one of the three, two boys who claimed to have seen him raping a little boy he had picked up on the street in Harare, was eventually taken to Mbare, one of the poorest townships in Zimbabwe. It is suspected that he found other victims there.
To date, only one of these three men has been tried and convicted for crimes against children, so he can be named in this article: James Chaning-Pearce.
In 1997, Channing-Pearce was convicted of seven counts of assaulting boys at a Jesuit school in Lancashire, England and was sentenced to three years in prison. However, the Catholic Church played no role in bringing Channing-Pearce to justice. He only faced accountability because a former student at St George’s School in Zimbabwe, who was abused by Channing-Pearce during his time there, pointed him to Australia. He found out that the priest was named in an investigation into historic abuse at a school in Lancashire and reported it to the British authorities. An investigation revealed that he had indeed abused children and he was extradited from Australia, tried, convicted and sentenced in England. To this day, Chaning-Pearce has never faced trial for his abuse of children in Zimbabwe
The great tragedy of the persecution of clergy in Zimbabwe is that Catholic schools such as St. Countless children from poor families have seen these schools as their chance to do something for themselves. It is sad to know that many of them did not get the education and care they were promised, but instead they were tortured in a horrible way.
The Catholic and Anglican churches in Africa must be listened to, just like in the United States and Europe. As they do in other places, the Anglican and Catholic churches must present full questions about sexual abuse in their schools in Zimbabwe and other places in Africa. African victims deserve, like victims in other parts of the world, to receive, if not justice, then accountability.
In announcing his resignation over the mishandling of the Smyth abuse scandal, Archbishop Welby said he hoped his decision to step down made clear “the Church of England’s deep understanding of the need for change and our deep commitment to building a safe church”.
In 2018, the head of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis, also fully acknowledged and apologized for his church’s failure to respond to clerical abuse.
In an unprecedented letter to all Catholics of the world, he promised that no effort will be spared to prevent the sexual abuse of priests and cover it up.
“The tragic pain of these victims, who cry to heaven, has been ignored for a long time, silent or silenced,” the pope wrote. “With disappointment and repentance, we admit as a community of pastors that we were not where we should have been, we did not act on time, we see the extent and magnitude of the damage done to many lives. We did not show concern for the little ones; we abandoned them.”
It gives a great sense of comfort and relief to see that after decades of silence and cover-up efforts, the Catholic and Anglican churches are finally acknowledging the mistakes of the past and promising to do better to protect children in the future. But so far, their repentance seems to be aimed only at white victims of clerical abuse in the West.
However, children in Zimbabwe and across Africa suffered from disgusting priests just as their white peers suffered in England, Ireland and the United States. Churches need to take swift, sensible action to acknowledge their pain and give these broken boys, now men, a chance at justice. Failure to do so will mean that victims of clerical 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 position of Al Jazeera.
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