The Church of England faces a long-overdue reckoning in Africa. Its leader, the 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 molester, to authorities.
Smyth physically, sexually and psychologically abused more than 100 boys and young men over four decades in Church of England-affiliated summer camps in England, South Africa and my country, Zimbabwe. He died in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2018, aged 77, without ever having to answer for his actions.
The independent examination of Smyth’s alleged crimes and the Church’s attempts to cover them up makes harrowing reading.
His “appalling” abuse of boys in England was identified by the Church as early as 1982, the review said, but he was not exposed to the public or held accountable to authorities. Instead, he was encouraged to leave the country and settle in Zimbabwe without any information being made 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 horrific crime took place in Marondera, just outside Harare, in December 1992. A 16-year-old boy named Guide Nyachure drowned in suspicious circumstances at a camp presided over by Smyth. Smyth was initially charged with culpable homicide, but the case was mysteriously dropped after dragging on for a long time with little progress and numerous errors by investigators. Smyth eventually moved to South Africa, with no accountability for his alleged role in Nyachure’s death.
The abuse Smyth inflicted on the boys in what was supposed to be a religious and nurturing setting of learning and growth was sadly not an anomaly. During the years that Smyth was active in my country, child abuse by clergy appears to have been endemic in many other contexts. I first became vaguely aware of allegations of abuse at my Catholic boarding school in 1989-90, when I was a student at the Jesuit St. Ignatius College in Loyola, near Harare. There were rumors about things some priests did to younger boys. Yet no one spoke about it openly or tried to do anything to stop it.
I discovered the true extent of clergy abuse in Zimbabwe’s Catholic schools years later, when I began researching a novel I just completed about abuse at a fictional Catholic boarding school . As part of my research, I spoke directly to some boys, now men, who said they were abused at my former school and at two other elite Jesuit schools in Zimbabwe – St George’s College and St Francis Xavier, better known as Kutama. They reported horrific abuse, inflicted with impunity on vulnerable young boys.
During my interviews, the names of three priests were mentioned most frequently. I learned that, as was the case with Smyth and the Anglican Church, the Catholic Church moved these men into different settings to protect them from accountability. I was told that one of the three, who two old boys said they saw raping a young boy he had picked up from the street in Harare, was eventually transferred to Mbare, one of the poorest townships in Harare. Zimbabwe. He would have found other victims there.
So far, only one of these three men has been tried and convicted for the crimes he committed against children, and can therefore be named in this article: James Chaning-Pearce.
In 1997, Chaning-Pearce was convicted of seven counts of indecent assault against boys at a Jesuit school in Lancashire, England, and sentenced to three years in prison. However, the Catholic Church played no role in bringing Chaning-Pearce to justice. He only faced accountability because a former student at St George’s School in Zimbabwe, who was abused by Chaning-Pearce during his time there, identified him in Australia. He learned the priest had been named as part of an investigation into historical abuse at the Lancashire school and alerted British authorities. An investigation revealed that he had indeed abused children and he was duly extradited from Australia, tried, convicted and sentenced in England. To date, Chaning-Pearce has never been held accountable for his allegations of child abuse in Zimbabwe.
An acute tragedy of clergy abuse in Zimbabwe is that Catholic schools like St. Ignatius, St. George’s and Kutama have attracted some of the brightest children from across the country, many on scholarships. Countless children from the poorest families saw these schools as their best chance for success. It is heartbreaking to know that so many of them did not receive the education and care they were promised, but were instead subjected to horrific abuse.
An assessment must be made for the Catholic and Anglican churches in Africa, just as has been the case in the United States and Europe. Just as they have elsewhere, the Anglican and Catholic churches must launch thorough investigations into historical sexual abuse in their schools in Zimbabwe and elsewhere in Africa. African victims deserve, just as much as victims in other parts of the world, to receive, if not justice, at least accountability.
Announcing his resignation over the mishandling of the Smyth abuse scandal, Archbishop Welby said he hoped his decision to resign clearly shows “how seriously the Church of England understands the need for change and our deep commitment to creating a safer Church.”
In 2018, the head of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis, also fully acknowledged and apologized for his Church’s failures to respond to clergy abuse.
In an unprecedented letter to all Catholics around the world, he promised that no effort would be spared to prevent clerical sexual abuse and its cover-up.
“The heartbreaking pain of these victims, which cries out to heaven, has long been ignored, kept silent or reduced to silence,” the pope wrote. “With shame and repentance, we recognize, as an ecclesial community, that we were not where we should have been, that we did not act in time, aware of the scale and seriousness of the damage caused to so many lives. We didn’t worry about the little ones; we abandoned them.
It brings a great sense of comfort and relief to see that after decades of silence and cover-ups, 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 appears to be directed only at white victims of clergy abuse in the West.
However, children in Zimbabwe and across Africa have suffered as much from predatory priests as their white peers in England, Ireland and the United States. Churches must take swift and meaningful action to recognize their pain and offer these broken boys, now men, a chance at justice. Failure to do so would be tantamount to saying that victims of clergy abuse do not matter as long as they are black Africans.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
