African victims of clergy abuse deserve justice and accountability, too

The Church of England is facing a long overdue reckoning in Africa.  Its leader, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, announced his resignation in November after an independent review brought attention to his failure to report to the authorities the barrister John Smyth, a prolific abuser of children.

Smyth is found to have physically, sexually and psychologically abused more than 100 boys and young men over four decades at Church of England-affiliated summer camps in England, South Africa and my country, Zimbabwe. He died in Cape Town, South Africa in 2018, at the age of 77, without ever being held accountable.

The independent review into Smyth’s alleged crimes, and the Church’s attempts to cover them up, makes for harrowing read.

His “appalling” abuse of boys in England was identified by the Church as early as 1982, the review found, but he was not exposed to the public nor held to account by the authorities. Instead, he was encouraged to leave the country and moved to Zimbabwe without any referral being made to police. It is believed that he physically and sexually abused at least 80 boys in camps he ran there 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 under 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 many mistakes on the part of the investigators. Smyth eventually moved to South Africa, facing no accountability for his alleged role in Nyachure’s death.

The abuse Smyth inflicted on boys in what were supposed to be nurturing, religious settings of learning and growth was unfortunately not an anomaly. In the years that Smyth was active in my country, the abuse of children by clergy appears to have been endemic in many other settings. I first became vaguely aware of allegations of abuse within my Catholic boarding school in 1989-90, when I was a pupil at the Jesuit-run College of St Ignatius of Loyola, near Harare. There were rumours of the things a few priests did to the younger boys. Yet no one talked about it openly or attempted to do anything to stop it.

I learned about the true scope of clergy abuse at Zimbabwean Catholic schools years later, when I started to do research for a novel I have just completed on abuse at a fictional Catholic boarding school. As part of my research, I talked directly to some of the boys, now men, who said they were abused at my old school, and at two other elite Jesuit schools in Zimbabwe – St George’s College and St Francis Xavier popularly known as Kutama. They gave an account of horrific abuse, inflicted on young, vulnerable boys with impunity.

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 around different settings to shield them from accountability. I was told that one of the three, whom two old boys said they witnessed raping a young boy he had picked up off the street in Harare, was eventually moved to Mbare, one of Zimbabwe’s poorest townships. He is alleged to have found more 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 faced accountability only because a former pupil at St George’s School in Zimbabwe, who was abused by Chaning-Pearce during his time l there, identified him in Australia. He learned that the priest had been named in an inquiry into historic abuse at the school in Lancashire and alerted the British authorities. An investigation had revealed that he had indeed abused children and he was duly extradited from Australia, tried, convicted and sentenced in England. To this day, Chaning-Pearce has never faced any accountability for his alleged abuse of children in Zimbabwe

An acute tragedy of clergy abuse in Zimbabwe is that Catholic schools like St. Ignatius, St. George’s and Kutama attracted some of the brightest children from across the country, many on scholarships. Countless children from poorer families saw these schools as their best chance to make something of themselves. It is heartbreaking to know that so many of them received not the education and nurturing care they were promised, but instead were subjected to horrific abuse.

A reckoning must come for the Catholic and Anglican churches in Africa, just as it has in the United States and Europe. Just as they did elsewhere, the Anglican and Catholic churches must launch full inquiries into historical sex abuse at their schools in Zimbabwe, and elsewhere in Africa. African victims deserve, as much as victims in other parts of the world, to receive, if not justice, then accountability.

In announcing his resignation over the mishandling of the Smyth abuse scandal, Archbishop Welby said he hopes his decision to step down makes clear “how seriously the Church of England understands the need for change and our profound commitment to creating a safer church”.

In 2018, the head of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis, had similarly acknowledged fully and apologised for his church’s failings in responding to clergy abuse.

In an unprecedented letter to all the world’s Catholics, he promised that no effort would be spared to prevent clerical sex abuse and its coverup.

“The heart-wrenching pain of these victims, which cries out to heaven, was long ignored, kept quiet or silenced,” the pope wrote. “With shame and repentance, we acknowledge as an ecclesial community that we were not where we should have been, that we did not act in a timely manner, realizing the magnitude and the gravity of the damage done to so many lives. We showed no care for the little ones; we abandoned them.”

It provides a great sense of comfort and relief to see that after decades of silence and attempted coverups, the Catholic and Anglican churches are finally acknowledging past mistakes and are promising to do better to safeguard children in the future. But so far, their repentance seems to be directed solely towards white victims of clergy abuse in the West.

However, children in Zimbabwe and across Africa suffered as much from predatory priests as their white peers did in England, Ireland, and the United States. The churches need to take swift, meaningful action to acknowledge their pain and offer these broken boys, now men, a chance at justice. To fail to do so would be to say the victims of clergy abuse do not matter as long as they are Black Africans.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.