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2008-02-19 issue:

Pastors in Zimbabwe risk lives in protest

by Everett J. Thomas

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GOSHEN, Ind.—Anglican archbishop John Sentamu, a Ugandan, cut up his clerical collar during a broadcast of the BBC on Dec. 9, 2007, and said he will not wear it until Robert Mugabe, current president of Zimbabwe, is out of office (News Digest, Jan. 8).

“What strikes those who visit Zimbabwe is how many have been undone by death,” said Sentamu in the interview. “It is no accident that the average life expectancy of Zimbabweans hovers around 35, lower than any war zone.”

Sentamu’s Dec. 9, 2007, interview is posted at www.youtube.com/watch?v=I88Wy7otcrc.

In the days following his action, more than 50 members of the Zimbabwe National Pastors Conference decided local pastors should also do a “Sentamu” by planning a series of marches in Harare. The pastors said they are prepared to die for the transformation of Zimbabwe.

“God has chosen us to be the voice of the voiceless,” said Lawrence Berejena in the Zimbabwe Standard on Dec. 16, 2007. “If we, as the church, remain silent, we will all perish.”

“Since Mennonites in the United States participate in protests regularly, this may not sound like a big deal,” says Joy Kauffman, an Illinois Mennonite woman who has taken special interest in the Brethren in Christ Church in Zimbabwe, “but in Zimbabwe, where gatherings have been made illegal, this is an act almost assuring arrest, imprisonment, even risking martyrdom. Those of us who are against war recognize this as a civil war of a regime, fueled by consumers and corporations who are complicit in profiting from the regime, against its own people.”

HIV/AIDS, as well as political oppression, is ravaging Zimbabwe. Bishop Danisa Ndlovu, who leads the 80,000 participants in Brethren in Christ churches in Zimbabwe and is vice president of Mennonite World Conference, says, “Pastors in Zimbabwe these days do primarily three things: We visit the sick, we bury the dead and we try to comfort the bereaved.”—Everett J. Thomas

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