”Deliver us from evil”, a simple prayer from the Book of Matthew in the New Testament — yet one that resonated powerfully in Zimbabwe this weekend.
Shaking off interdenominational differences, church officials and members met in two cities on Saturday to intercede against hunger, poverty, corruption and HIV/Aids.
They also prayed for peace and reconciliation in Zimbabwe, which has been wracked by political violence since 2000. Clerics from neighbouring South Africa, Botswana and Zambia were on hand to lend support at the meetings, held in the capital, Harare, and Zimbabwe’s second-largest city of Bulawayo.
The gatherings kicked off amid reports of violence in Zengeza, just outside Harare, where residents were casting ballots in a two-day by-election. By the end of the weekend, the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) said at least one of its supporters had been killed by youths from the ruling Zanu-PF party — while several others were injured.
”Each time I come to this nation, there is only one word that comes to me: pain … pain … pain,” said Reverend Emmanuel Buthelezi from the South African port city of Durban. ”So we have come to pray with you … One day, we’ll overcome.”
Pastor Raymond Motsi of the Bulawayo Baptist Church said the Saturday service, to date the biggest of its kind, was the start of a continuing programme ”to gather momentum and mobilise people” as part of Gandhi-style peaceful protests. (Mahatma Gandhi, who led the struggle for independence in India, achieved global renown for his passive resistance to colonial rule.)
”We have found that Zanu-PF is a military machine that’s armed to the teeth,” explained Motsi, adding: ”We have to deal with them in a powerful, but peaceful, way.”
Zimbabwean authorities have enacted a number of laws that appear designed to muzzle government critics. These include the Public Order and Security Act, which restricts public gatherings — and makes it an offence to issue statements that could be viewed as undermining the authority of the president.
Motsi says since civic organisations are being denied a platform for their concerns, the church has stepped in. For the time being, state security agents do not appear to have jurisdiction within church premises under the Public Order and Security Act.
Although the government has systematically acted against its critics, Motsi says he doesn’t fear that the church will be next in the firing line — providing it continues ”to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves”, he added, quoting from Matthew.
Still, two days before the prayer meeting plainclothes policemen armed with a search warrant raided the offices of Bulawayo Agenda, a pressure group. Seeking clues about the upcoming prayer meeting, they confiscated books, letters, documents and 16 video recordings of the organisation’s public meetings.
The officers returned later to arrest the group’s 23-year-old administrator. She was only released when Bulawayo Agenda’s coordinator, Gorden Moyo, turned himself in. Moyo was detained for 12 hours before the prayer meeting where he and four other civic leaders were honoured for services to the community.
Police also went to the offices of a community radio station that is pushing for independent broadcasters to be allowed to operate in Zimbabwe. They took documents from the offices, including invitations to an upcoming arts festival, and interrogated two staff members.
The station’s director, Father Nigel Johnson — a Jesuit priest — had been arrested three months earlier for filming a music video. He was in South Africa on business at the time of the search, but said later that police ”seemed to be looking for printed stuff with regards to the prayer service”.
Johnson said the officers might also have been looking for clues as to who had assisted the BBC in filming a documentary on the activities of Zimbabwe’s controversial youth militia, also known as ”green bombers” because of their uniforms.
However, police claim the various searches and interrogations were justified by the strongly worded fliers that were distributed prior to the prayer meeting in Bulawayo. These pamphlets, they say, made the meeting look like a major political rally — likely to be proscribed under Zimbabwean law.
The Bulawayo gathering took place at the city’s main Catholic church. The head of the Catholic faith in Zimbabwe, Bishop Pius Ncube, is among the most outspoken critics of President Robert Mugabe.
In his address, Ncube lamented that one in every five Zimbabweans had left the country because of political and economic concerns, ”… and there are people who pretend things are normal. They are liars.”
He added that in March alone, electricity bills had quadrupled in certain instances, leading to a situation where people were living under bridges. Infrastructure such as sewage pipes and traffic lights was in disrepair.
Father Jerome Arones, from Cape Town in South Africa, said the price of bread had more than doubled since his last visit to Zimbabwe in September.
”I wonder how the ordinary man lives?” he asked.
The churches have resolved to open their doors every Wednesday afternoon for further peace prayers.
The start of 2000 saw the occupation of white-owned farms in Zimbabwe by blacks who were reported to be veterans of the country’s war of independence. The government’s claim that the occupiers were acting without state guidance has been hotly disputed, with critics claiming the invasions were part of a strategy to ensure a Zanu-PF victory in parliamentary elections.
When the occupations first got under way, the majority of Zimbabwe’s best agricultural land was owned by minority whites — despite a number of attempts by the government to accelerate the process of land redistribution. The country’s struggle for independence was, to a significant extent, motivated by racial disparities in land ownership.
The 2000 parliamentary poll and a subsequent presidential election in 2002 were characterised by political violence that mainly affected the MDC.
Zimbabwe’s economy has also taken a battering in recent years, in part because of the country’s costly involvement in Congo-Kinshasa’s civil war. This allowed high-ranking Zimbabwean officials to benefit from resource exploitation in the Congo.
Triple-digit inflation is now the order of the day, along with food and fuel shortages. — IPS