Province of Central Africa CAPA

Council of Anglican Provinces of Africa CAPA

The Province of Central Africa was formed in 1955 and linked the dioceses of Mashonaland and Matabeleland in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) and Nyasaland (Malawi). To Malawians this sounded like ‘the stupid Federation’, to use Dr Banda’s phrase, under another name.

Bishop Frank Thorne in Nyasaland, who had for years made his anti-Federation views known to the Legislative Assembly in Zomba, embarked on a long correspondence with cabinet ministers in Britain and Salisbury in an unsuccessful attempt to get the African view considered. In 1959 he wrote to Roy Welensky, the Federal Prime Minister:

Government in Central Africa depends on the consent and goodwill of the governed and I am afraid that in this county at any rate your Government does not enjoy this as far as the African population is concerned.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsay, gave his public approval to Frank Thorne’s opinions but it was the rebellion of Malawi’s African people that finally broke up the Federation. When I arrived in Malawi in 1961, Federation was dead in all but name.

Visit by Archbishop 1964

I invited Archbishop Olive Green Wilkinson, Bishop of Zambia since 1961, to spend a week or two in Malawi to meet some of the people who had never seen an archbishop. He accepted at once and in May 1964 we arrived on Likoma Island on ‘Boatie Paul’, our Dutch canal barge. It is hard to imagine how she came to be sailing on a lake which in 1946 had swamped the Viphya, a brand new steamer and drowned 350 passengers and crew. The crew were well aware of Paul’s limitations and we trusted them.

Provincial Synod 1966

Oliver as archbishop was supportive and challenging. In January 1966 Provincial Synod met in Blantyre, Malawi. It was a tense moment. Ian smith, Prime Minister of Rhodesia, had two months earlier declared UDI – a unilateral declaration of independence from Britain – claiming that he was defending Christian values.

Most of the delegates to the Synod from Rhodesia were white, most of those from Zambia and Malawi were black. Oliver opened synod by saying:

“We meet today for the first time in Malawi, divided by sharp political differences. It is certain we cannot all be right, it is possible that we are all wrong. It is probable that God can find something of good to use in what each one of us offers. Jesus came as one who serves. We must come as servants, stripped of status and honour but freed to put first our task to tell people the good news about Jesus Christ, the servant.

Rhodesia

The big issue in Rhodesia then, and in Zimbabwe now, was and is land distribution. In 1908 a Missionary Conference said the soil of ‘Native Reserves’ was poor and they should be enlarged. In 1917, the Native Reserves Commission recommended to Britain that five and a half million acres should be added – but also that six and a half million ‘most suitable for European farming’ should be removed. Obediently, an Order in Council was issued in London in 1920 to enforce this division.

Arthur Shearly Cripps – a missionary and a poet extensively quoted in the Oxford Book of Mystical Verse had arrived in Rhodesia in 1901. He admired and imitated Francis, the Poor Man of Assisi, and identified with the Africans of Rhodesia. He gave his clothes to the cold, ate little but sadza (maize-meal porridge) and made long journeys on foot to fetch medicines for the sick.

Cripps, backed by John White, a Methodist missionary, published a blistering attach on the Administration in a pamphlet, A Million Acres. He had no support from his bishop, who wrote to the London Times: “Natives in this country are dealt with in that spirit of even-handed justice for which the flag of England stands.” The African majority was powerless. In 1923 government was placed in the hands of its white population.

Bishop Edward Paget, Bishop of Mashonaland 1952- 1957, was the dominant figure for the next 30 years and became the first Archbishop when the Province was formed in 1955. He faced a racial issue even before his enthronement. It had not occurred to the cathedral authorities to invite Africans to the service. Paget heard about this and ordered them to send invitations. If they did not, the enthronement would be transferred to a downtown African church. In his early years, he wrote later, “It was thought strange that I stayed as the guest of an African priest. I received unstamped and anonymous letters of abuse.”

However, Paget believed in working through the Establishment, described by Guy Clutton-Brock, who was later deported, as “Bishops, politicians and generals who all met in the colonialist Salisbury Club. The bishop had ever one foot in the Establishment and one in the kingdom of God.”

In the late 1950s the situation altered. The white population grew from 53,000 to 223,000, many of them artisans who felt threatened by African advancement. Independence had already come in Ghana and nearer home in Zambia and Malawi. Joshua Nkomo’s African National Congress caused alarm. In 1959 the Whitehead government declared a State of Emergency and imprisoned leading nationalists without trial. Gonville ffrench-Beytagh, Dean of Salisbury, asked Synod to support a motion asserting that government action was based on “other than Christian principles,” but his own churchwarden moved an amendment stressing Paul’s teaching that, “the powers that be are ordained by God.” and accepting without question the need for imprisoning people.

Some of the clergy supported Bishop Cecil Alderson but only a minority of the laity, including some very able people. Sir Robert Tredgold, a Presbyterian and the grandson of the pioneer missionary John Moffatt, resigned as Chief Justice in protest against the legislation he was expected to enforce. Many members of the Christian Action Group against discriminatory laws and were detained or deported, including the Clutton-Brocks.

Kenneth Skelton had been the outspoken Bishop of Matabeleland from 1962 to 1970. In 1964, when UDI was threatened, he said in a sermon, “The Church might have to say its people were under no obligation to obey a government which took such illegal action.” The sermon earned him the title of ‘Red Skelton’ in a section of the white community. He also questioned the disparity in clergy salaries within the church itself.

Jeffrey Fenwick, who worked in Rhodesia for twenty years and who was totally in sympathy with his views, says of him, “His was a lonely voice. His exhortations could often be dismissed as the eccentric views of a left-wing individual and would have carried more weight had he worked more closely with some of the liberal-minded lay people in Matabeleland, who were always ahead of the Salisbury establishment.”

Kenneth’s wife found the ostracism hard to bear and for this and other family problems, he returned to England where, as Bishop of Lichfield, he master-minded the revolution in marriage laws which have allowed thousands of couples to remain as communicants after a second marriage.

Mark Wood followed Kenneth as Bishop of Matabeleland in January 1971. He was an articulate Welshman and we had been contemporaries at Mirfield. He had worked in the Johannesburg townships for ten years, originally as a member of the ‘old students’ team. Following his marriage, they moved to Rhodesia and Mark was the outspoken Dean of Salisbury Cathedral when he was elected bishop. I had high hopes and was not disappointed. In his charge to synod in 1973 he said:

“Despite detention and deportation I thank God that more and more people, both black and white, are willing to make their political views known. Rhodesia needs more politics, not less. Lay members of the Church most certainly should engage in politics. I denounce terrorism as unchristian; in the same breath I also denounce as hypocrites those who denounce terrorism but are unwilling to do something about the injustices and grievances which cause it.

When will people learn to talk to each other and see each other’s point of view before the breaking-point of resorting to violence is reached? Leave your colour outside this synod – and your status and your sex too – and as Christ’s body, the Church, let us try to see things through Christ’s eyes.”

Here from Bishop Mark’s last Synod charge is one of those things that was not easily said in Rhodesia, and even less easily accepted:

“If white people are to stay on in Rhodesia, it can only be in a multi-racial society. White privilege cannot be maintained for ever, or even much longer. And even if it could, we could not organize the Church on that basis.”

Declaration of Independence 1965

Ian Smith became Prime Minister in 1964 and in November 1965 declared “UDI”– claiming that in doing so he was defending ‘Christian values’. The Governor, Sir Humphrey Gibbs, an Anglican layman, refused to co-operate. From then on either Humphrey or his wife were in Government House twenty-four hours a day, since laying hands on them personally would be high treason against the Queen. Whenever the bishops met in Salisbury we would spend an evening with them.

The Churches were united in opposition. On the closure of Vatican II in 1965 Donald Lamont, the Catholic Bishop of Umtali, came straight from the airport to Government House to show his solidarity with the Churches which had stated: “We do not recognise the present regime as the legal authority of Rhodesia.”

Provincial Synod 1968

The 1968 Provincial synod held in Rhodesia at Marendellas (now Marondera), was lively and encouraging, with a genuine African feel about it. A tense moment in a debate about whether the Province could continue in view of the political tensions between Ian Smith’s Rhodesia and Kenneth Kaunda’s Zambia, was relieved when one of the African laymen said, “I came here fearing apartheid but I find myself sleeping in the same room as the white Dean of Bulawayo (FROM MALAWIAN CHURCH LEARNING CHICHEWA)

Church and State in Rhodesia

Relations between Church and State in Rhodesia quickly got worse. In June 1970 I wrote:

“There was such a moment in South Africa fourteen years ago. Government wanted to make a law to stop black and white worshipping together. Archbishop Clayton wrote to the government to say that if the law was passed his clergy would go to prison rather than obey it. As he signed it he had a heart attack. His body was found the next morning beside the desk on which the letter lay. The law was dropped.

“Now the same issue has arisen in Rhodesia. Bishop Paul Burrough has written to the government to say, “The Churches cannot exercise Christian charity to all ‘by permission’ . If permission was withheld, all their institutions would become useless bricks and mortar.”

“Bishop Kenneth Skelton of Matabeleland has written of “The specious lie that our government is upholding Christian standards by its racial policies.” Magnificently said, but was this just the lone voice of a political bishop out of touch with his own people, as some have said? The answer came the next day when his Diocesan Synod carried by 98 votes to 8 a resolution moved by a white layman endorsing the statement of the church leaders.”

Archbishop’s last visit

In May 1970 Oliver, accompanied by his sister Prudence, who was showing the first stages of the Parkinson’s Disease from which she subsequently suffered for many years, made another visitation, this time of the southern lakeshore, including Chief Mponda, the senior Yao Chief. They visited all seven institutions at Likwenu/Malosa and went on to Blantyre where they called on Revd Jonathan Sangaya, General Secretary of the CCAP Blantyre Synod, the Catholic Archbishop Chiona and the ecumenical Christian Service Committee. I wrote:

“The last day was a marathon – Mass and a sermon at St Paul’s; 143 candidates to confirm at Matope; a tour of Matope Hospital and the new maternity unit for which Chief Symon and his people have given so generously and back to Malosa after two hundred miles of driving, mostly on gravel roads, just in time to address the students at Malosa Secondary School. It is visits like this that makes ‘Oliver bishopu wathu wamkulu’ – Oliver our Archbishop – step out of the pages of Mapemhero and come to life.

Death of Archbishop and funeral

Three months later came the terrible news that Oliver had been killed on 26 August when a tyre burst on his car. He was returning to Lusaka after saying good-bye to the staff of St Francis Hospital, Katete, preparatory to his move to the Copper-belt in central Zambia and handing over of Lusaka and the whole of southern Zambia to Bishop Filemon Mataka.

Bishop Josiah Mtetateka and I were present at his funeral in the new Lusaka Cathedral. In my address I said:

“When St Francis knew he was going to die, he said, ‘Welcome, my sister Death.’ The man we know and love as ‘Oliver’ was also baptised with the name ‘Francis’. He was a member of the Third Order of Franciscans. The last thing he did was to say good-bye to the staff and patients St Francis Hospital, Katete. In that same hospital he died a few hours later and his ashes will rest in the outdoor Chapel of St Francis in the grounds of this Cathedral.

The things that made St Francis loved and remembered are those for which Oliver was loved and will be remembered – his simplicity of life; his burning love for Christ and for all who God created; his sense of fun; his surrender even of the happiness of marriage.

A clue to his life and influence is in the simple wooden coffin in which he lies among us now. They wanted to take his body out and put it in a splendid shiny coffin with silver handles but his sister said, “No. He wanted to be a bishop of the people. Let him be buried as a man of the people.”

During the war Oliver was a Desert Rat in North Africa, he fought in Italy and on the Normandy beaches and was decorated for bravery. He was a citizen of Zambia and a personal friend of your great President. He agonised over all the tensions of race and politics and poverty that are part of the life of everyone in Africa today. He had a fiery love for his nation of Zambia, but of that President Kaunda will speak in this Cathedral on Saturday.

Another clue is in the simple iron shepherd’s crook he carried when he visited us in Malawi. At A lakeshore village he was given a live sheep and he demonstrated with zest how a shepherd’s crooks is used. His work as Archbishop involved him in the life of five countries – Congo, Botswana, Rhodesia, Zambia and Malawi – as different as any in the world. There are tensions, political and racial, in an between some of these countries. More than once Oliver found himself under cross-fire. But he understood that the healing oil of personal friendship has a magical power, and this was his greatest gift.

“He had an immense circle of friends. They were not just friends in name but those for whom you would find him praying on his knees in his chapel before sunrise. They were of different races, of different faiths, of different political convictions. He saw his task as the building of unity. This wish he carried as a team ministry with his sister Prudence, for whom our love and prayers go out today.

When Francis of Assisi was dying, he called the Brothers together and asked them to recite his hymn in praise of Brother Sun and Sister Moon and all who suffer. Then he added some new lines. I cannot think of any better way to express what this follower of St Francis has to say to us today:

Be praised, my Lord, because of Sister Death

From whom no one living can escape.

Happy are those found doing your will.

Praise and bless the Lord, and give him thanks

And serve him with great humility.

Provincial meetings Lilongwe 1971

“Daddy, why are you always at meetings?” our first born complained. Sometimes I wondered, but the Provincial meetings in Lilongwe in June 1971 made history and changed my life. For the first time in the sixteen years it had been in existence, its Standing Committee had an African majority. Between 1963 and 1969 only nine of its 73 voting seats had been occupied by Africans. Now it had come of age.

Its first act was to create a new diocese of Lake Malawi, consisting of Northern and Central regions, which held half of the population of the country and nearly two-thirds of its Anglicans,. The next was the election of Josiah Mtetateka as its founding bishop by a vote of thirty-eight to nil. Measured by annual confirmations and baptisms, his new diocese was growing faster than any Anglican work in the Province, including Southern Malawi where I was bishop.

The Province welcomed the recommendation of the 1968 Lambeth Conference that if there was no Anglican church nearby, and on special ecumenical occasions, Anglicans should be free to receive communion in other churches. At Lambeth the bishops had agreed to this by a majority of 351 votes to 75. At Lilongwe the vote was unanimous.

Much thought was given to the training of clergy. Until 1957 all Malawian clergy had been trained in the vernacular at St Andrew’s College, Makulawe on Likoma Island, most recently by Leonard Viner. From then on they had been sent to the new Provincial Seminary at St John’s Lusaka, of which John Weller was head. There were no boarding facilities for wives or children and there were constant requests for ordinands to be brought home to meet family crises, a long and expensive journey. Every diocese wanted its new priests to be trained alongside those from other churches and those heading for other professions, with their families, in their own countries. This was a tall order at a time when grants for theological training were focussed on ‘properly staffed’ ecumenical colleges.

No theological college existed in Malawi that met these requirements. For the coming year some of the Malawi ordinands, with their tutor Rodney Hunter, were quietly absorbed into the Catholic major seminary at Kachebere. The border between Zambia and Malawi ran through the centre of the seminary. This worked well until the new Malawian Catholic bishops, all trained before Vatican II to regard Anglicans as protestant heretics, realised that their future priests were being trained dogmatic theology by Rodney Hunter. They put an end to the arrangement. Several years later, George Ndomondo, now released from detention for his part in the Chipembere rebellion, joined Nkhoma Seminary, linked to the Cape Province Dutch Reformed Church and at the other end of the Catholic-Protestant spectrum.

The final solution was a joint CCAP-Anglican theological college adjoining the university’s Chancellor College in Zomba.

Lastly they elected me as archbishop and installed me in St Peter’s Lilongwe the next morning. The Province was a complex animal.

Province

In the four countries contained in the Province, Zambia, Malawi, Botswana and Zimbabwe with Mashonaland based on Harare (then called Salisbury) with Paul Burrough as Bishop and Matabeleland centred on Bulawayo in the south-west, where Mark Wood had just taken over as bishop from Kenneth Skelton. Zambia was being divided into three and later four dioceses, while Malawi remained with Lake Malawi and Southern Malawi. Botswana was just about to elect its first bishop

Botswana was by far the wealthiest, having discovered diamonds and other minerals in the 1970s and was the only country in sub-Saharan Africa to have a ‘developing economy’ equal to that of Brazil. Zambia was benefiting from a copper boom, while the two Zimbabwean dioceses were the most developed. Malawi was by far the poorest of the four countries and survived economically only by exporting the more adventurous of its young men to work on mines and farms in Zimbabwe, Zambia and South Africa.

Zambia visit

I began my new job with a three-week visit to Zambia. I stayed with Canon George Hewitt who had begun his work as a missionary in the year I was born (1916) and I paid homage at the grave of Leonard Kamungu, the firs Malawian priest and a member of the missionary team which brought the gospel to Zambia. St Francis’ Hospital, Katete had been founded by the priest-doctor Francis Trefusis in 1946, formerly a missionary in Nyasaland and had now been developed by James Cairns into a fine hospital. I was interviewed on radio and TV at the fine inter church multi-media centre in Lusaka. I had lunch with President Kenneth Kaunda, who asked for the Church to criticise him when he went off the rails, a request one could not imagine President Kamuzu Banda making.

At Kitwe on the copperbelt, I asked an inter-racial congregation to put themselves into the shoes of two sets of parents, one in Zimbabwe whose only son had been called up to serve the security forces and the other in Zambia where an only son had joined the freedom-fighters. I asked them to hold them both in their prayers. Outside the church afterwards a very angry white woman came to be brandishing her sunshade and saying, “I never thought I would live to hear a bishop calling terrorists freedom-fighters.”

I met six frustrated Franciscan monks at an old rural centre where most of the people had left for the copperbelt. If they had been posted to one of the burgeoning urban centres, I have no doubt they might still be there today. I met an inspiring voluntary priest who was ‘Father Kampango’ on Sunday and ‘R.Phiri – Tailor’ from Monday to Saturday.

Provincial Synod 1972

Provincial synod met in Lusaka. The theme of my charge was the one word ‘Sent’. I asked the delegates from seven dioceses to confront the hard fact that our population was growing by 500,000 each year and our membership by only 1,000, saying:

“We clergy see ourselves as chaplains to those from the well-springs of the missionary pioneers – Penhalonga, Msoro or Likoma Island – rather than as messengers. We have been too anxious to exclude. One man was brought to me recently who had been cut off from the sacraments for twenty-five years. His fault? That fifteen years before he was baptised, he had married a Muslim wife from whom he rightly refused to be parted and with whom he had lived faithfully for forty years.

As the Church in Central Africa we must reflect a continent where most are young, where half are female and where 98% are black. It would have been hard to guess any of these things from the Provincial Synod which met here ten years ago. Perhaps the man who described us as “Unyoung, uncoloured and unpoor” was looking through the window. It still has, God forgive it, a white Archbishop.

We must shed the rigidity and the Englishness we brought to Africa. We need a Church where the young feel accepted instead of being criticised; a Church that is self-supporting right down to the local unit; a Church that is self-propagating because every member has accepted his or her commission to show that God cares and therefore his family cares.”

Alston Mazingaliwa, Diocesan Secretary of Lake Malawi, said in his report:

“I will never forget the synod eucharist. There was a youth choir, with drums, visekese (reed and seed rattles) and other African instruments. I asked myself, “Are these young people sinning against God? Is the Church in Zambia sinning by accepting the use of drums in church? The time has come for we Africans to worship God in our own culture.”

Provincial Synod 1976

Provincial Synod meant getting together representatives from Zambia, Rhodesia, Botswana and Malawi, of which the first two were in a state of undeclared war. After three failed attempts we succeeded in holding it in Botswana. It was the most African synod of the twenty-year history of the Province. Even the disappearance of my suitcase in Johannesburg with all my robes and papers was relieved by the tongue-in-cheek telex sent by Malawi Airways to all the airports in Southern Africa – ARCHBISHOP IRATE AND WITHOUT CLOTHES. (this was in a letter from D to Felix)

Among the important motions agreed to at the Synod were those relating to marriage and the ordination of women. The Synod agreed that a non-Cristian man with more than one wife may be received into the Church with his believing wives and children and in due course be confirmed and receive communion, provided the local community gives its willing consent and only within a context where the Church’s teaching on monogamy is strictly recognised. This had been forbidden by the Lambeth Conference of 1888 an had caused much heart-burning espedcially where we were working in Muslim communities.

On the question of the ordination of women, the Synod agreed to ordaining women as deacons but another motion to ordain women as priests was defeated.

Diocese of Lake Malawi visit 1977

Lake Malawi diocese had not had a proper ‘visitation’ from me for the eleven years that Josiah had been in charge, first as suffragan and then as diocesan bishop. October found us, together with Canon Lloyd Chikoko, at Imani on the Central region lakeshore. My diary records:

Wednesday. Woke up in church. Shaved by feel, followed by hot and cold shower by emptying the two pots of water over self in the grass bathroom specially built for us. Mattins, mass and confirmation in a grass lean-to specially built as the church could not old the crowd expected. Twenty-two confirmed. Three years ago there was one christian in the village – a young widow.

The rest is her work, helped by Canon Chikoko, aged 62, who travels on foot a parish 50 miles by 20. He nearly died of cholera a year ago and now has a hand in plaster, broken when he fell ten foot over a river bank at midnight, having lost his way in search of a new village. Now he has 53 congregations in his parish, all but seven of them newly created in the past five years.

As we end, a rabid dog scatters the congregation but is quickly dealt with by the newly-confirmed who are almost all young men and their wives.

We go on to Siyasiya. Of the 52 confirmed, three are village headmen. One old man, formerly a Muslim, tells me of his fighting in German East Africa in World War I, where he learned enough Swahili to become an interpreter in the Cape Town courts.

The day ends at Mkokoka withy chicken roasted in the coals of a wood fire and a concert of

hymns to traditional Malawian tunes, magnificently sung by the young men’s choir, while I struggled to read the words by the light of an African full moon.

Thursday. Wake at 5.30 and realize the beauty of their new church, plastered in two coloured earths, charcoal grey below and beige above. Outside the lovely call of the black-headed bush-shrike. Realize with a shock that the 62-year-old canon and the 73-year-old bishop Josiah have long since risen, washed and packed up their beds and that the servers are laying out vestments…

A young woman reads the first lessons with her baby on her back. “She preaches a very good sermon too”, Canon Chikoko whispers in my ear.

On the way we stop to greet old Canon Jameson Mwenda, who retired many years ago. Every room in the house and every patch of shade in the yard is filled by a milling crowd of a hundred mothers and children. Knowing his firm views on morality, we ask if this a wedding celebration for a second wife. No, just that the District Council wanted somewhere to start an Under-5 clinic, so he offered his house.

Provincial visit 1979

Jane was elected Provincial President of the Mothers’ Union in 1978, so we made a joint visit to Rhodesia and Botswana in January 1979.

Diocese of Mashonaland

Bishop Paul Burrough had arranged an outline programme for our visit.

Shabani – a ‘hot’ area, where we visited Noel Williams, a gently-spoken dumpy, iron-fisted saint and a Mirfield father. He had a long-standing arrangement to travel on a motor-bike to an isolated congregation. The District Commissioner said he must not go as it was too dangerous. “Nonsense” says Noel, “I’ve promised and I shall be there.” After a long argument he agreed to walk, considered safer, and the DC said he would collect him in a reinforced landrover at noon. At 4.00a.m. Noel set off by himself through the bush. Twelve noon came and went but no DC’s landrover. So Noel started walking back at 1.00p.m. All the way he could see members of his congregation criss-crossing through the trees and calling to one another, making sure no guerrilla aimed a gun at him. Next day the DC explained that he had not come to collect him ‘to see what happened!” For the next year guerrillas and security forces allowed him to go unmolested, something that would not have happened had be been collected in the DC’s landrover.

Jane writes: It was intended that Donald and I should meet people at a township church, but there had been shooting there the night before and I was disappointed at not being allowed to go. Donald went alone to the confirmation. Just before the communion in the church where I was worshipping I heard six or eight rounds of automatic rifle fire. I had visions of Donald lying in a pool of blood at the altar steps. But all was well and he appeared for a late lunch.

Garfield Todd was a New Zealander, Churches of Christ missionary, Prime Minister in the 1950s, adviser to Joshua Nkhoma, and held in detention on his ranch by Ian Smith. He lived twelve miles outside Shabani, where we went to see him. The week before he had had metal meshing fixed to his windows, have received letters threatening assassination from members of the white community. He and his wife Grace had lived in Rhodesia for forty-four years and were wonderful examples of Christian witness. It was good to hear him say that on his rare visits to Bulawayo many whites came up to him to wish him well. .

Gwanda – Police insisted we should have an armed escort, so for 120 miles we followed a landrover with 4 automatic rifles sticking out of it, held by two black policemen. Keeping up with guns that would shoot to kill was a sobering experience.

We met the Enrolling Member of the Mothers’ Union who comes from Malawi. She told us that her fifteen-year-old son had disappeared the week before, possibly to Mozambique. Last year another son of seventeen had joined guerrillas in Zambia. She had been intending to take the fifteen-year-old to Malawi. She was desolate at leaving it too late. Lunch at a hotel with whites of the congregation, one of them wearing a gun.

Comments received: a miscellany –

• The war is tearing me in half. I have a son fighting for the security forces and another for ‘The Boys’. What happens when they meet?
• The ‘Keeps’ in Tribal Trust Lands (fenced-in cages with no protection from sun or rain) are like concentration camps. It is mostly young people who are put there – no buildings no lavatories, men and women together, very little food or water. They stay for months.”
• Planting of crops is forbidden by guerrillas in some places, by security forces in others. Long curfews make care of crops and cattle almost impossible.
• A chief had been killed by guerrillas. The District Commissioner supervised the burning down of 53 village houses until a white man intervened to stop him.
• The referendum by whites on 30 January might have happened on Mars as far as Africans were concerned. But it did show 80% of whites ready to live under a majority government.
• Many Africans commented on the pressure they were under for following ‘the white man’s religion’.
• All big government services take place in Salisbury Cathedral, giving the impression that this is the state church, unsympathetic to the African struggle for independence.

Consecration of Peter Hatendi

The consecration of Peter Hatendi as suffragan and later diocesan bishop of Mashonaland was moving and memorable. The choirmaster to the largely white choir had said the choir could not sing on Friday nights so one of the clergy gathered a choir from various township churches. The result was a packed cathedral resounding to triumphant Shona music, accompanied by drums, khudu horns and rattles. The conductor, paralysed from polio, was sitting cross-legged on a high stool. Many church leaders were there, including Bishop Muzorewa of he African Methodist Episcopal Church and Archbishop Chakaipa of the Catholic Church.

Diocese of Matebeleland

Matabeleland is on the dry south-western side of Rhodesia, far poorer than Mashonaland with its capital of Salisbury, now Harare. The Ndbele used to call Salisbury ‘Bambazonke’ – ‘Grab all’. Robert Mercer, who had been deported from South Africa in 1970 for his stand against apartheid, the Bishop living Bulawayo had arranged an interesting visit.

At Kwekwe we were taken to a supper party for clergy and their wives by a priest carrying a gun. As we reached the house after several miles on earth roads he said, “We made it!” It is much easier to plant landmines on earth roads than on tarred ones. He was just voicing what most people feel when they get to the end of an earth road.

What we learned

As we travelled we noticed a number of good things happening:

The Guild of St Agnes

This for girls who had left school but not yet married. I found them building a new house for their priest, learning baby-care, taking Mattins and Evensong when the priest was away on ulendo, playing the drums in church, teaching the Sunday School, being the choir, learning and teaching in Literacy classes and beating the school team at netball. Two young organisers move about the diocese stimulating new groups and providing ideas. Malawi, please copy!

Urban Ministry

This is carried out by a team of five priests, four black and one white, of whom the leader is Archdeacon Jonathan Siyachitema. He will be the guest of our two dioceses in Malawi for a fortnight next month, learning something of Malawi before going to Canada as our Provincial representative at their planning conference. I hope our urban team will pick his brains when he is with us.

Workship

A church where candlesticks are carved out of wood, two African women kneeling with pots on their heads, which are the sockets for the candles. Why, I wonder, do we beg for ugly brass cast-offs from churches in England when we have the finest hardwoods in the world?

Music

Throughout Rhodesia drums are a normal accompaniment to singing. The singing puts us in the shade, partly because hymns in Malawi are pitched at the level a normal male can’t reach.

Crops

Matabeleland is not the most fertile part of Rhodesia. Much of it is flat, dry thorn bush country, better suited for cows than for human beings. Yet the Gokwe ‘Tribal Trust Land’ last year exported crops equal in value to the total tea exports of Malawi. This is what good co-operation between the races can do.

As we flew back to Malawi it was easy to see the boundaries of the Tribal Trust Lands – over-crowded, over-grazed and eroded. Ian Smith had recently agreed that there were at least three million acres of unused, good quality European-owned land. Re-allocation of land needs to be dealt with as a matter of urgency, together with an intensive programme of agricultural training and an ongoing transfer of skills.

Botswana

Botswana was pleasantly relaxed. Following the resignation of Bishop Shannon Mallory the election of Khotso Makhulu as the new bishop had gone smoothly, though we were a little sad that the only woman on elective assembly was Ruth Khama, the wife of the President, Seretse Khama. The vast wealth of the new diamond, nickel, coal and copper mines shows itself in better resourced services.

The Mothers’ Union were doing wonderful work throughout the country, especially in the more remote areas.

Dean of Cathedral detained

The shadow of South Africa loomed large as was shown by the detention of Michael Molale, the dean of Gaberone Cathedral. He had been helping refugees from South Africa and was changing planes at Jan Smuts airport in Johannesburg. When passing through customs he was arrested and taken to the Vorster Square police station opposite the cathedral, notorious for people ‘falling out of the window’. He was questioned for twenty-four hours non-stop and was surprised to see photostats of letters he had sent to Europe (all overseas mail from Botswana goes through Johannesburg) and to have quoted to him conversations in his own sitting-room. On the same floor were forty-eight children, most of them had been in solitary confinement. Their only way of knowing who was still alive was to pass a song from one to another at 5.30pm each day –

By the blood of the Lamb

And our own blood

By the blood of the Lamb

We shall be free.

Michael sang this to us to a haunting Zulu tune.

Michael’s wife, Joyce, became worried when Michael did not telephone and got in touch with friends in Johannesburg who told their lawyers. They issued a statement to the international media, saying that the Dean of Gaberone Cathedral was being held by South African police. He was released the next day, after fourteen hours of solitary confinement.

Council of Anglican Provinces of Africa CAPA

In 1979 we had the privilege of inviting to Malawi the archbishops of the eleven Anglican provinces of Africa for the first meeting of CAPA which was held at Chilema Lay Training Centre. Archbishop Festo Olang of Kenya was its Chairman and I its Secretary.

The aims of CAPA were to develop links and understanding between the provinces. One of its first greatest achievements was to set up training courses for newly appointed bishops in Africa. The Council has since gone from strength to strength.