When seven Zimbabweans announced on October 4 that they were suing the Church of England for enabling the brutal abuse they suffered at the hands of John Smyth, a leading figure in its evangelical movement, their action was not only about justice for the past. It was an indictment of an institution that has never reckoned with the violence it spread under the banner of faith.
Smyth was not an isolated predator. He was part of the Church’s powerful inner circle. A respected British barrister as well as an evangelical leader, he oversaw Christian camps in the United Kingdom, Zimbabwe and South Africa, where more than 100 boys and young men were abused. He embodied the authority and social privilege that shielded him from scrutiny. When reports of his abuse first surfaced in England in the early 1980s, the Church chose silence over accountability, allowing him to carry his cruelty to Africa. In Zimbabwe, his victims were boys from Christian camps, among them 16-year-old Guide Nyachuru, who was found dead in a camp swimming pool in 1992. More than three decades later, Nyachuru’s family has joined six other survivors in a lawsuit against the Church, demanding accountability for both the abuse and the Church’s deliberate inaction.
That history has now returned to haunt the Church. What began as the concealment of one man’s crimes has become a symbol of a much older truth: the Church of England’s authority in Africa was never only spiritual. It was built on conquest, complicity and the sanctification of empire.
On November 7, 2024, the Makin Review, an independent inquiry established to investigate the abuse perpetrated by Smyth, delivered its long-awaited findings. The report was damning. It revealed how senior Church figures had systematically concealed his crimes for decades, treating him as “a problem solved and exported to Africa”.
Four days later, Archbishop Justin Welby resigned, accepting both personal and institutional responsibility for what survivors described as a decades-long conspiracy of silence. His departure marked a symbolic moment of accountability but offered little comfort to those who endured Smyth’s brutality. With Sarah Mullally now archbishop-designate, survivors have urged the Church to use this transition as an opportunity for real accountability rather than another gesture of regret.
The Church’s failures in the Smyth case were not only moral lapses. They were the modern echo of its imperial habits: exporting problems to the colonies and protecting privilege at home. The logic of domination that once justified conquest also enabled silence.
My family grew up under the long shadow of the Anglican Church.
In the 1950s, my father attended St Augustine’s High School in Penhalonga, Manicaland, one of Zimbabwe’s oldest and most respected Anglican schools. His elder brother also studied there and later became a renowned Anglican priest, teacher and head teacher at St Mathias Tsonzo in the 1970s.
I was baptised in the Anglican Church in Kambuzuma and christened at St Paul’s in Marlborough. For that reason, I feel both bound to the Church and deeply ashamed of that bond.
Like many others, I never fully confronted its past or present brutalities. At independence from Britain in April 1980, Prime Minister Robert Mugabe, a devout Catholic, promoted a policy of reconciliation that urged forgiveness without truth and progress without justice. After decades of colonial rule, we were told to move on, never to look back and ask who we had been before the Berlin Conference of 1884.
For 45 years since, there has been no serious effort to hold the Church accountable for its expansive role in Zimbabwe’s colonisation.
In 1890, when Bishop George Knight-Bruce blessed the Pioneer Column, a paramilitary expedition funded by the British South Africa Company (BSAC) to seize Mashonaland and Matabeleland for the empire, the Anglican Church positioned itself as the spiritual arm of conquest.
Knight-Bruce and his successors saw empire and evangelism as inseparable tools of divine order. They acquired extensive tracts of land seized by the BSAC while preaching salvation through submission to the colonial state.
By the turn of the 20th century, the Anglican Church had established mission stations at St Augustine’s, St Faith’s and St David’s (Bonda) in Manicaland. These were not schools at their inception but evangelical outposts, centres for conversion, settlement and the consolidation of colonial authority that later evolved into major educational and medical institutions.
They also trained and disciplined African labour for the colonial economy, teaching obedience and industry as Christian virtues in the service of the empire. The pulpit became a weapon of assimilation, and the classroom a tool of subtle erasure and indoctrination. In sermon and scripture alike, subjugation was camouflaged as enlightenment.
The colonisation of Zimbabwe was, at its core, a commercial enterprise, and the Church of England profited morally, spiritually and materially from the bloodletting of local communities. Children were taught to despise their culture and submit to an English higher power. The missionary’s cross stood beside the soldier’s rifle, each ensuring the other’s success. Conversion became another form of conquest.
This was the faith that shaped generations of African Christians like myself, conditioning us to rationalise Western dominance as divine design.
This was not a Zimbabwean anomaly.
Anglican missionaries were deeply entangled in imperial aggression throughout Africa. In Kenya, for instance, the Church became part of the colonial system of violence and mass incarceration during the 1950s. The brutality it enabled abroad was mirrored in England itself: polished in appearance but ruthless in practice.
That same creed allowed Smyth to abuse Zimbabwean children under the banner of religion, while the Anglican Church posed as a pillar of moral authority.
I attended St Paul’s youth programme on Friday afternoons in the 1980s and was fortunate to emerge unharmed. Others were not as fortunate. They endured Smyth’s violence because the Church’s leaders in Britain regarded African lives as disposable.
This official dehumanisation was the direct result of the Church’s refusal to confront its historical wrongs or reform its moral culture. Centuries of Anglican hypocrisy, entitlement, denial and racism, perfected on slave plantations and in the colonies, forged the monster Smyth became in Zimbabwe.
Today, despite my background, I no longer call myself an Anglican or, for that matter, a Christian. I have not set foot in an Anglican church for 16 years, and I have no plans to do so.
Indeed, I no longer pray to the God of the English. My faith in the Church of England and its teachings was broken beyond repair long ago.
Far from being an atheist, I now seek a belief, redemption and identity rooted in the knowledge that we, the Manyika of Manicaland, had our ways of faith long before colonisation. What the Church called civilisation stripped our ancestors of their freedom, their voice and their sacred connection to the divine.
To this day, the Church of England has done nothing to repair the harm it inflicted on Zimbabwe. Despite occasional expressions of regret, it has remained cautious, even defensive, about the crimes it sanctioned in Africa, insisting that it will offer “no apology for spreading the gospel around the world”.
Now, with Sarah Mullally chosen as archbishop-designate, little suggests that the Church intends to confront this legacy with the courage and candour it demands. Its public expressions of contrition remain hollow and performative.
Yet the Church’s wealth, a fortune built on centuries of tithes, land seizures, slavery and imperial investments, now exceeds 11.1 billion pounds ($14.8bn). For all its riches, reverent words and supposed moral leadership, a Church shaped by empire still acts as though African pain deserves sympathy but not reparative justice.
Until it pays compensation for stolen land, funds reparations and redeems what it destroyed, the Church will remain what it has always been: the principal accomplice and amoral heir of empire.
The case of Smyth and the “Zimbabwean seven” exposes the spiritual bankruptcy of an institution sustained by the delusions of white divinity.
The Church of England owes Zimbabwe more than an apology. It owes us a reckoning with its soul, if it still has one.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
