Zambezia (1988), XV (i).ESSAY REVIEWANGLICANS AND ROMAN CATHOLICSBEFORE AND AFTER INDEPENDENCEWRITING CHURCH HISTORY has its own peculiar problems. No church existssimply in terms of its institutions because a church is not its institutions but thebody of believers which pay allegiance to it. Belief in itself is difficult to quantify,for of its very nature it is internalized in the believer and, although sacramentalchurches can obtain some sense of how widespread belief is through people'sparticipation in liturgical practices, statistics of baptisms, confirmations andpartakings of the Eucharist make for dull history.The historiography of missionary churches is even more difficult to handle.The central question that must be asked of any successful missionary enterprise iswhy it succeeded at all. Missionary success, after all, means that a people who hadreligion appropriate to their whole cultural experience chose to repudiate it andput in its place a set of alien beliefs which, more often than not, designated theirformer practices as works of the devil. One way of considering the success ofmissions is to invoke the power of the Spirit which draws people to Its lightthrough Its own mysterious processes. Such an account of conversions may besatisfying in pious magazines, but history does not deal in mysteries. If missionaryhistory is to satisfy, it must offer an account which pays some attention to crises inthe culture of a people, the problems the old religion had in accommodating thosecrises, and the way in which the teaching and practices of the new church have apeculiar and engaging relevance.W. E. Arnold has chosen another, and to me the least satisfactory, way ofwriting a history of the Anglican Church in Zimbabwe.1 He deals with the menand women, bishops, priests and lay-people who have over the years worked forthe Anglican Church in this country. Sometimes his account degenerates into alist of appointments and resignations, accompanied by a brief biographical sketchof where people had come from and where they were going. What they thoughtthey were doing when they were here is hardly addressed, except for the Bishopswho seem to have been pretty certain about their mission. What Zimbabweansthought of their comings and goings and why some chose to join the church seemnot to be issues in Arnold's text. This is a pity, because a history of the AnglicanChurch in Zimbabwe should be very interesting. As a church it had a uniquerelationship with the settlers and the authorities of Southern Rhodesia.Anglicanism was not an established church here, although Bishop Skelton recallshaving difficulty in persuading the Roman Catholic Bishop of Bulawayo of thisfact.2 The latter's confusion is understandable because the Anglican Churchalways behaved as though it had a privileged position. It was the church of thevarious governors and would emerge on state occasions to give its blessing to1 W. E. Arnold, Here to Stay: The Story of the Anglican Church in Zimbabwe (Lewes,Sussex, The Book Guild, 1985), 159 pp., price not reported.2 K. Skelton, Bishop in Smith's Rhodesia: Notes from a Turbulent Octave, 1962-1970(Gweru, Mambo Press, Mambo Occasional Papers Š Missic-Pastoral Series 12, 1985), 152 pp.,ZJ6.90.6.7576 ANGLICANS & ROMAN CATHOLICSwhatever was going on. The reason for this was, of course, that the majority ofWhites would have been nominally Anglican, and at those various moments insettler history when the essential Britishness of Rhodesia was being bandied aboutto show that we were not South Africans, the monarchy's spiritual authoritycould be located in the Anglican Church as its secular authority was located in theGovernor and Assembly.Arnold's book contains maddeningly few statistics, but Skelton mentions inpassing that in the diocese of Matabeleland there were equal numbers of Blackand White communicants. In Mashonaland the proportions are something liketen Blacks to one White, although one would not guess this from Arnold'saccount. He mentions the great missionary centres of St Augustine's, St Faith's,Bonda and Daramombe, but their success in terms of baptisms is not explored. Infact, if I had not had access to figures giving the racial make-up of theMashonaland Anglican Church, Arnold would have left me with the impressionthat in this respect Mashonaland Anglicanism resembled that of Matabeleland.This in itself is interesting as the Anglican Church is the only mainstream churchin Zimbabwe of which it would not be automatically assumed that membership isoverwhelmingly Black. But both the status of the Anglican Church and theimpression of it as the settlers' church created its own problems. As the establishedchurch in England and the most important settler church, Anglicanism waspeculiarly vulnerable when African nationalism challenged the morality of Whitesupremacy and segregation, when it challenged the ideologies on which settlercolonialism was based. The question then arose whether the principal institutionsof the Anglican Church were so inscribed with supremacist ideology that evenwhen Anglican leaders opposed the Rhodesia Front, they spoke not for theirBlack Anglican members but out of a liberal discourse within settler ideology.The tension between the different demands and expectations of Black andWhite Anglicans can be seen from the beginning of the church's work in thiscountry. Arnold cites Marshall Hole's impression of Canon Balfour in the early1890s: 'He was torn between the duty imposed on him of Christianising thenatives and that of ministering to the spiritual needs of the pioneers with whom hehad arrived and among whom he made his friends'. Of Balfour's excursions fromSalisbury on foot, Marshall Hole wonders 'what possible impression could oneman make upon hundreds of thousands of savages scattered over an area the sizeof France and steeped in witchcraft and the grossest form of paganism?'3 Thatquotation is a useful one because it sums up how differently work among Blacksand Whites could be perceived. 'Among whom he had made his friends* is arevealing quotation when it is set alongside savages, witchcraft and grosspaganism. Marshall Hole may not be the most representative voice of theAnglican laity but his sentiments about the task of the missionary were expressedin a slightly more euphemistic way at the first Synod of the Church in 1903. Aresolution on 'the native question' speaks of neither individuals nor races beingborn with equal faculties or opportunities. It notes that the native is unambitious,and attributes this to polygamy and the absence of wants. The Church sees itselfworking hand in hand with the State so that 'irresponsible nomads may be turnedinto citizens and kraals into homes'.4 Throughout, it emphasizes the discipline of3 Quoted in Arnold, Here to Slay, 13. 4 Quoted in ibid., 21.A. J. CHENNELLS 77work. The one dissenting voice in the passing of the resolution was ArthurShearly Cripps, already a maverick among his brethren. Similar quotations couldbe found from the official statements of all the churches at this period, but comingfrom the Anglican Church it shows how far Anglicanism confirmed the routinecontempt with which the British South Africa Company's officials wereaccustomed to write about the cultures of the people whose land they hadoccupied. The Anglican Church was in a position to be the conscience ofofficialdom and it was not for many years that it made any attempt to accept thatresponsibility.Perhaps the strongest indication of how far the Anglican Church almostunconsciously identified with the settlers can be seen in the pattern of residence ofexpatriate clergy. Arnold notes that in the early days of the settlement and after1960 the great majority of clergy stayed here only four or five years. Theproportion of priests staying ten or twenty or more years slowly increased over theyears until the uncertainties of the 1960s led most to serve no more than theduration of their initial contracts.5 Arnold puts a brave face on this: it meant thatthere was always a body of clergy in England or South Africa who knew theneeds of the Church in Rhodesia and were willing to help from outside. A lesscharitable view of these movements is that the Anglican clergy followed theordinary patterns of immigration and emigration of the settlers themselves. Mostof these stayed a few years and then moved on to South Africa or back to Englandwhen the various economic and political crises of the colony's history increasedthe insecurity of Whites. As with the settlers a few stayed to become permanentresidents. This could be interpreted to mean that the Anglican Church was staffedwith people who, whatever their motives for coming here in the first place, sooncame to share the anxieties of other Whites about the country's future. If this isindeed what happened, they must have been alienated from Black Anglicanswhose interpretations of crises and hopes for the future were necessarily verydifferent from those of the settlers.In fact, as Arnold's account shows, these divisions in the Anglican Church didnot become a public issue until African nationalism began to produce analternative agenda for Rhodesia in the early 1960s. The bannings of successivenationalist parties and the split between ZANU and ZAPU which turned thetownships into places of violence coincided with the appointment in 1962 ofKenneth Skelton as Bishop of Matabeleland. He shows a very different face ofAnglicanism from that with which Whites and Blacks had been familiar over theprevious seventy years. But the Diocese of Mashonaland in the late 1960s and1970s, and after Bishop Skelton's departure the Diocese of Matabeleland as well,tried to steer some middle course between the expectations of Whites and Blacks.How far this would have been different if Alderson had not been killed in acar accident and Skelton had remained is difficult to tell from Arnold's account.At the time of UDI Alderson wrote of utterly repudiating it as an illegal act andalthough he lacked Skelton's combative style he seems to have been in sympathywith the Christian principles Skelton was trying to proclaim as normative in thesituation. Bishop Burrough on the other hand saw the role of the Bishop ofMashonaland as that of reconciler. Reconciliation would have been an admirable< Ibid., 33.78 ANGLICANS & ROMAN CATHOLICScounsel even ten years before his appointment but by the time he set out toreconcile the racial divisions in his diocese, the violence of the State was beingcountered by a nationalism which had resorted to arms and was willing to use a'just war' theology to justify its choice of action. Burrough often spoke and wroteas if both state and nationalists acted from equally morally defensible positionswhich even at the time seemed difficult to understand. With the 1969Constitution the Rhodesia Front regime made race the explicit taxonomy withinwhich the political life of the country was to be maintained, and from that timeonwards the battle lines were drawn between most of the church leaders and theregime. Burrough joined with other heads of denominations in opposing the newConstitution but in the decade which followed his emphasis on reconciliation in asituation where Whites were defending the indefensible and Blacks were aspiringto what was justly theirs made it often seem that he was trimming his sails to thewinds of settler ideology. He approved of the 1971 constitutional proposals, ablunder the enormity of which was shown the following year when the PearceCommission demonstrated Š if demonstration were required Š that these weretotally unacceptable to the vast majority of the people. Perhaps the nadir of hisepiscopate came when he preached in St Paul's Cathedral condemning the use offorce. His assistant, Bishop Muridagomo, publicly criticized what he had said onthat occasion and Burrough had to confront the fact that the racial divisions in thecountry and his own diocese extended to the leadership of the Church.Arnold reports these differences of opinion but does not analyse their causes.One reason was that Burrough responded to reports of the war in the local mediawhich were expressions of a sophisticated propaganda exercise. Nationalistguerrillas were invariably represented as murderous thugs who had no supportfrom the people. Atrocities by the security forces were never mentioned and theimpression of a peaceful land turned into a shambles by nationalist savagery wasconveyed by press and radio day after day. This was the way White Rhodesianssaw the war and it is hardly surprising that most of them should have regarded anyclaim that there was a defensible morality in the nationalists' methods andmotives as wickedly perverse. But that Burrough should have given theimpression of sharing the limited understanding of his fellow Whites of how thewar was being conducted is difficult even now to explain and defend, except thathe shared with White members of his flock an understanding of the events leadingup to the war and of how the war was being conducted.Arnold takes us through to the years after Independence. With theappointment of Bishop Hatendi to Mashonaland after Burrough's retirement andthe creation of the new diocese of Lundi and Manicaland the Anglican Church atlast allowed its structures to reflect the fact that the majority of Anglicans inZimbabwe are Black and rural. By acknowledging this the Anglican Church canjustly proclaim the optimism of Arnold's title: Here to Stay.If we merely had Arnold's book to look at the history of Anglicanism beforeIndependence it would make for sad reading. Fortunately, Kenneth Skelton'saccount of his eight years as Bishop of Matabeleland was published in the sameyear and provides an impression of a very different sort of witness withinAnglicanism from that which the Church of Arnold's account seems to offer. InSkelton's book we see a man who was aware that Black and White Anglicans inhis diocese not only had very different perspectives on the political life ofA. J. CHENNELLS 79Rhodesia but that these were formed from positions whose morality it waspossible to judge. Skelton did judge and had no hesitation in showing that theposition of the Whites was based on injustice. Naturally enough the Whites didnot like to have their way of life characterized as immoral and, with Lamont andTodd, Skelton soon became one of the Whites most loathed by his fellow settlers.In fact his book opens with an anonymous woman threatening to shoot him andSkelton was soon being pilloried in press and Parliament. Skelton's credibilitywith the Whites would probably not have been greatly enhanced had he beenhere longer. Their many years in the country helped neither Lamont nor Todd,and Sir Robert Tredgold, who was born in the country and was one of the fewgreat men White Rhodesia produced, was frequently spoken of as just anothercrank hopelessly out of touch with the realities of the situation.But perhaps Skelton was seen by the Whites to be so egregiously offensivebecause he was a new arrival and because he showed scant respect for theunspoken convention that no newcomer should comment on the politicalattitudes and institutions of Rhodesia until he could do so from a WhiteRhodesian perspective. The effectiveness of his criticisms were also mitigated bythe antagonism to Britain which reached one of its several peaks in the early1960s as a consequence of Britain's withdrawal from much of Africa and herrefusal to grant independence to Rhodesia. For whatever else Skelton was he wasEnglish. When one reads his book now, one sees this Englishness not as the dis-advantage which the Whites would have regarded it in the 1960s but as a sourceof the insights into and the frequent outrage he felt at the situation around him. Heknew what the Whites could have been and what they had become. A chaptercalled 'The White Dilemma' shows an awareness of the Whites' insecurities andfears, strengths and weaknesses which is as perceptive as many longer pieceswritten about the White community: Rhodesian nationalists who merelyreproduced middle-class British life-styles in Africa; intensely ignorant about thepeople in the land they called their own; hard working and above all conformist tothe mediocrity of opinion and debate which Smith and his party had madenormative. On several occasions Skelton expresses his astonishment at theunwillingness of liberal Whites, appalled at the sorry drift of public life under theRhodesia Front, to make their opposition public. As an Englishman he is veryconscious of how quickly British immigrants who in Britain would have been atthe bottom of the social pile assumed the privileges which their race guaranteedthem. Like Lessing before him, Skelton senses a communal neurosis among theWhites which he attributes to insecurity and guilt. He quotes Guy Clutton-Brock's brilliant epigram: 'Our Africans are the happiest people in the world andwe the most joyless' Š and the angry edginess he finds all around him in the early1960s would certainly confirm the justness of the last part of that remark.Skelton is less sure of himself when he writes of Blacks. He calls them 'MrSmith's Other Citizens' and he writes with compassion and perception of theinsults and contempt to which they were routinely subjected by Whites. This,though, is a comment on the Whites rather than on the Blacks themselves. Moreimportantly he understands how the economic structures of the country and theracial divisions of the land impoverished most of its people. As far as his ownchurch is concerned he soon becomes aware of how the discriminatory practicesof the society at large were reflected in discrimination in clergy salaries and80 ANGLICANS & ROMAN CATHOLICShousing. How far he addressed himself to these issues within his own diocese ishard to tell from the book. He was referred to by the Anglican archbishop inLusaka as the conscience of the Church in Rhodesia, and he may well have aimedat being a national figure rather than a good housekeeper within his own diocese.This concern with the moral health of the whole country is perhaps the reasonwhy he seems weak when he writes about Blacks as people rather than a politicalgroup. They are wise, polite, joyful, acute, patient, although Š gesturing towardsscience Š he notes their inability 'to react energetically' which he attributes tobilharzia, drought and poverty.6 The Africans' thirst for education is introducedby an anecdote of a youth wading into a stream, in which Skelton's wife anddaughter were paddling, in order to establish the correct position of a decimalpoint.7 There is, in short, a tendency when Skelton writes of Blacks to write ofthem in White liberal cliches which sit awkwardly with his considered statementsof their political disabilities and their political potential. It is difficult to avoid theword 'quaint' when one considers his depiction of Blacks.The key to Skelton's short episcopate lies in a sermon he preached shortlyafter Smith arranged to replace Winston Field as Prime Minister and when anillegal declaration of independence seemed probable. The following SundaySkelton made persecution the subject of his sermon. Of course he was perfectlyright in identifying this as the likely fate of a church which opposed the RhodesiaFront, which had so strong a sense of the right ness of its cause that it designatedanyone who disagreed with it as evil. It would be unfair to say that Skelton invitedpersecution. He spoke as he saw fit, identifying the glaring immoralities ofRhodesian life. But it would also not be unj ust to record the feeling which one hasas one reads this book of the relish with which he took on the role of warrior forChrist, alone and embattled in his fight for Christian values in his church and inthe country at large.It is the sense of the solitariness of his witness that his book provides that onemust take issue with because it gives a misleading picture of his actual role in theRhodesia of the 1960s. Certainly he shows that there were other Christians whowere speaking out. For example, he quotes the Roman Catholic Bishops' Peacethrough Justice, which was issued before he came to the country, and whichspoke of 'laws of men which are in contradiction to the natural law'.8 After hissermon on persecution he joins other church leaders in Salisbury who issue a jointstatement emphasizing the need for the consent of the people before anyconstitutional change is made. There are numerous references to the ChristianCouncil and the Heads of Denominations organization. But all this evidence thatother church leaders were profoundly concerned at what was happening isunderplayed: Skelton is at the centre of the stage. Of the Salisbury statement hewrites of his satisfaction 'that the minds of others had been moving in the samedirection [as his own]'.9 He adds that he was thankful that he could find himself inline with his colleagues. Often this sort of egotism results in ludicrous asides, aswhen he notes that 'the rich and fortunate are privileged to provide for the poorand unfortunate', and adds in parentheses that Pope Paul agrees with him.10Other examples can be provided. Skelton quotes from his Synod charge ofSkelton, Bishop in Smith's Rhodesia,Ibid., 38.Ibid., 9.35.* Ibid.,'" Ibid.,7.100.A. J. CHENNELLS 81May 1964 in which he returned to the theme of persecution in a morally sicknation, and then adds that Lamont said much the same thing in 1968 when hespoke of the physical violence in the country being insignificant beside the moralviolence 'daily offered to so many who simply because of race or colour must becontent to remain second-class citizens'." Lamont had been pursuing this themethroughout the 1960s and the implication that Lamont was echoing Skelton issimply inaccurate. Injustice to Skelton it must be noted that when in 1970 all thechurches opposed the residential provisions of the Land Tenure Bill, he givescredit to Father Randolph for an analysis of what implications the provisions ofthe Bill would have for any church which worked in the so-called Tribal TrustLands. He mentions the Roman Catholic bishops' threat to close all theirinstitutions rather than register as Voluntary Organizations, which was how theBill designated the churches. But even amidst these generous concessions thatChristian consciences other than his own were being disturbed by Rhodesia Frontlegislation, he makes his very good sermon preached in Umtali for a meeting ofthe Christian Council an important contribution to the debate, mentions thehostile press it received and comforts himself that 'on this occasion I wasmassively supported' a month later by other church leaders.12In the event, Skelton had little impact on White members of his flock,although, since much of what he said after UDI was censored, this is not perhapsvery surprising. Skelton mentions the frustrations of censoring but draws someconsolation from the fact that the Roman Catholic bishops had no more successin getting their message across to Whites than he had. In 1961 the Catholicbishops' Pastoral spoke of the 'shameful comment on us all... that the Catholicsof Rhodesia do not seem to have heard the message', and there was littleindication that their message was heard during the next twenty years untilIndependence forced a change in White consciousness. As Skelton remarks, thevoice of Rome may make a greater impression than that of Canterbury or Genevabut it 'is not much more heeded by those who do not want to hear'.13 Theimplication of this seems to be that if Whites did not pay much attention to theRoman Catholic bishops, it is no wonder that Skelton, embattled and alone,worked to so small a result.At one point in his book Skelton assures the reader who may have had doubtsabout it that because of the devotion and generosity of many of the Anglican laityin Matabeleland, he was not 'Bishop of some insignificant little show'.14 Onewonders whether he protests too much and whether the high profile he strove forwhile he was in Rhodesia was an attempt to give significance to an appointmentwhich the Bishopric of Matabeleland did not possess. In the 1960s I was gratefulfor the witness of Kenneth Skelton; I am sorry now that the self-importance of somuch of this book does little justice to the united stand of so many Christianleaders to the growing evil of Rhodesia Front policies during the 1960s.Skelton at one point makes a joke Š his book at times shows humour in itsauthor but this is not one of the better ones Š that the Anglican Church is the only'free church' in the country which is not beholden to some outside authority; it isindigenous and self-governing. As we have seen from Arnold's history, until11 Quoted in ibid, 51. l2 Ibid., 109.13 Ibid., 98. '« Ibid., 88.82 ANGLICANS & ROMAN CATHOLICSIndependence the Anglican Church was indigenous in theory only. No bishopwho retired remained in the country and Paget retired to live in South Africa.Skelton himself resigned from Matabeleland to become an Assistant Bishop ofDurham. (He attributed his resignation to family reasons which was perhaps acoded way of saying that he feared the scandal that deportation or even im-prisonment could bring to the Church.) But Skelton was quite correct inemphasizing that each diocese of the Anglican Church is self-governing, andalthough each bishop is linked fraternally to other bishops of the Anglicancommunion none has any authority over how another diocese conducts its affairs.This may in part explain why Skelton's opinions come across as personal andsubjective. He is not expressing or attempting to express a magisterium or even anagreed point of view with his fellow bishop in Mashonaland. There is little sensein his book of a listening bishop whose teaching voice is informed by the opinionof the People of God within and outside his diocese. Although the labours of theAnglican laity are referred to, it is hard to tell how such people affected his ownideas; when he cites sources from outside Rhodesia, they are used to confirmrather than provoke his own ideas.In this respect his book contrasts strongly with Father Randolph's Dawn inZimbabwe}5 This is based on the quinquennial reports for the years 1977 to 1981made to Rome by the various Roman Catholic bishops in Zimbabwe and whichthey are required to make by Canon Law. Such a report covers all aspects of thesituation in a particular diocese and in the case of these reports covers the lastthree years of the liberation war and the first two years of Independence. It isironic that the church with an authoritarian tradition, as Skelton characterizesRoman Catholicism, should on the evidence of this book be more willing to listenthan to proclaim. Randolph shows a church exploring with curiosity and charitythe complex realities of the situation it is working in, suspending judgement onpolicies which its traditional teaching condemned out of hand and admitting itsown failure to witness during the long years of Southern Rhodesia. The country ofRandolph's book is not the country of Skelton's in which there are Whites andtheir dominant ideology and Blacks and their dispossession and the lonely butprophetic voice of Kenneth Skelton. Admittedly, Randolph is writing about afive-year period which demanded more complex responses from the Christianleaders than the eight years whose tensions and antagonisms Skelton recalls. Inthe 1960s Blacks could still be made objects of Christian compassion; in the late1970s and early 1980s Blacks were in control of their own destiny. But, evengranted the very different political forces which were operating during those twoperiods, Randolph's book has a documentary richness and variety whichSkelton's book lacks, and the complex situation he portrays grows out of thatvariety.For example, he writes about the late 1970s as a period whenEvery emotion and prejudice was unleashed into action and confrontation. For theChurch to be silent, was to acquiesce in an unjust situation, or to be irrelevant; to speak out,was to be accused of'mixing politics with religion', or to be acclaimed as a social reformer;15 R. H. Randolph, Dawn in Zimbabwe: The Catholic Church in the New Order: A Reporton the Activities of the Catholic Church in Zimbabwe for Five Years 1977-1981 (Gweru,Mambo Press, Mambo Occasional Papers Š Missio-Pastoral Series 13,1985), vii, 235 pp., ZS7.50.A. J. CHENNELLS 83to approach either side, was to be accused of collaboration with the enemy by the otherside; to be confronted as a missionary in the field with what the government forces called'terrorists' and what the majority of the people called 'freedom-fighters', required animmediate decision to be made on the spot in charity and in justice, which led to adilemma: refuse the 'freedom-fighter' and be shot; or assist the 'terrorist' and be hanged.... The Black wanted liberation; the White wanted the continued security of his familiarprivileged status quo. The Black wanted indigenisation, 'incarnation', inculturation of theGospel into an African setting; the White hankered after the sophistication of westerncivilization, now less Christian and more than ever neo-pagan.In addition to this, as Randolph points out, the Roman Catholic Church had todeal with these various crises at the very tirne when it was rediscovering its ownsense of itself amidst all the tensions and disturbances of the new post-Vatican IIorder. '*As these quotations suggest, Randolph does not flinch from registering thebrutality of the war on both sides. Skelton's Blacks are quaint; Randolph showsthem as much more humanly varied. Among the guerrillas some were militantlyanti-religion, some were friendly to the missions and some who called themselvesguerrillas were simply bandits 'owing allegiance to no one but themselves'.17 Atthe end of the war twenty-five Roman Catholic religious and lay-workers hadbeen killed, eighteen deported, fifteen secondary schools and three hospitalsclosed. It was a terrible toll, although in comparison to the numbers of Blackskilled in the war, which Randolph put as high as 80,000, it is astonishing thatmore missionaries did not die. Although the ZANU(PF) leadership alwaysinsisted that it was not a racial war they were engaged in Š a profession whosetruth has been amply demonstrated since Independence Š the temptation to killWhites who were entirely unprotected in communal lands must have sometimesbeen very strong. As Randolph observes, the Church had for a very long timesupported the political status quo, and although from 1961 onwards the pastoralsof the Roman Catholic Bishops made such a charge no longer tenable, there wereseventy years of collaboration to account for. In fact, an appreciation of theChurch's later stand was made by President Mugabe himself when he spoke in1980 of the significant role played in the liberation war by the Roman CatholicChurch: 'Not that they fought with arms as we did, but they opposed racialism,and refused to be made an agent of the Government implementing racial policies.... it helped to internationalize our grievances and helped to mobilizeinternational support for us.'18Why did the Roman Catholic Church emerge so well at the end of the war?One reason must be precisely its international dimension to which PresidentMugabe refers. Like an Anglican bishop, a Roman Catholic bishop is the supremeauthority in the diocese, but always behind the latter's teaching is the Vatican. Atits worst the Vatican is obsessed with centralization, conformity and theperpetuation of its own power; at its best it provides the channels by which anindividual bishop can learn from and contribute to the teaching of the Church inevery part of the world. The Anglican Church is also an international church, butwith its traditions of multiple discourses, Anglican teaching can invite disagree-" Ibid., 26-7. " Ibid., 29.18 Quoted in ibid., 57.84 ANGLICANS & ROMAN CATHOLICSment as readily as it can assent. Skelton was probably more intelligent than any ofthe Roman Catholic bishops in this country during the 1960s, but his exhortationcould easily be dismissed as the eccentric comments of an individual. When theRoman Catholic bishops issued their joint pastorals they made it clear that theywere judging Rhodesia by the standards of a universal and international Christianmorality. White Rhodesia had a deep mistrust of internationalism, but theinternationalism of the bishops came from men who were intimately involved inthe Rhodesian situation. What they wrote could not be dismissed as the opinionsof people ignorant of the details of the local situation.It is this awareness of peculiar details of the local situation which makesRandolph's book so interesting; such details can be provided only by ecclesiasticalauthorities accustomed to collating the evidence of people in widely differentsituations and approaching similar problems from widely different points of view.Judgements are, of course, offered but the emphasis of the book and presumablyof the bishops' reports is on the evidence itself: people and government are beingallowed a voice. The examples of one chapter, 'The Enigma of ZimbabweanSocialism', can be used to demonstrate Randolph's and the bishops' methods. Itconsists almost entirely of quotations, with only occasional comments byRandolph. He notes, for example, that the term 'communalism' was being used inpreference to communism in speeches made just after Independence and wasbeing opposed to a selfish individualism which no Christian could defend. Hequotes from the ZANU(PF) Manifesto of 1980 which recognizes historical, socialand other constraints which will make the transformation of Zimbabwe into asocialist society a gradual process. Far from opposing the social teachings of theCatholic Church, President Mugabe in an interview in 1978 remarked that 'thebasis of organizing society which brings people to work together to avoid rampantindividualism seems to be in harmony at least with the Catholic Church.'19Throughout this chapter numerous quotations from Party documents andpoliticians' speeches emphasize ZANU(PF)'s belief that people must be allowedcomplete freedom to practise their religion. Shortly after Independence PresidentMugabe spoke of Marxism-Leninism being one of several influences on theparty's socialist ideology: there is also 'a streak of morality that runs through ourprinciples, and this morality is a synthesis of our tradition and our Christianpractices here'.20 On another occasion President Mugabe defended the collectiveownership of the country's resources by referring to Genesis where man is givendominion over the earth. The use of biblical texts to justify policy is seen againwhen Dr Chidzero takes the injunction, 'Love thy neighbour as thyself, and seesin it 'all the principles of social life, all the objectives of society, and all thenecessity for action.' Put into practice even a pagan can become an 'AlterChristus'.21 Vice-President Muzenda, on the other hand, observes that the PapalEncylicals Rerum Novarum, Mater et Magistra and Populorum Progressio are allinfluenced by Marx in their diagnoses of society.22 Perhaps the most frequenttheme in the quotations is the impossibility of reconciling the Church's socialteaching with 'the avaricious nature of capitalism'. A secondary theme in thechapter is that ZANU(PF) envisages an active partnership between Church andState." Quoted in ibid., 72. » Quoted in ibid., 73.» Quoted in ibid., 76. » cited jn ibid., 79.A. J. CHENNELLS 85Randolph is interested in more than Church-State relations, although, giventhe period covered by the book, these are given a prominence unusual in ad liminareports. He gives, for example, a detailed account of events at the seminary whosesorry history of strikes, silences and closures is a scandal in the local church. He isalso interesting on the resurgence of traditional religions before and after Independ-ence, which added another problem to Christian communities in rural areas.Skelton noted how little attention White Roman Catholics paid to their bishops,and Randolph confirms this: 'It is certain that in some cases Churches wereemptied of the European element of their congregation, because of the "politics"of the Parish clergy and the relationship with him of his prejudiced parishoners[sic]'.23 Above all, Randolph gives an account of a church going about its businessof teaching the Word, adjusting its institutions to meet the new circumstances ofwar and independence, and noting the successes and failures in its mission.In fairness to Skelton's elegant text it must be added that Randolph's book issomething of a baggy monster. Perhaps because he is collating six separate reportswhich made use of the same information, there are several quotations which keepon recurring. As with Arnold's book there is no index, although that omission isperhaps more serious in Here to Stay which is a history. All the information onewants about the Roman Catholic Church during the five-year period it deals withis there. It is a pity that the publishers did not do a more thorough job of editing,thus making it more accessible.University of Zimbabwe A. J. CHENNELLSa Ibid., 157.