  Mugabe hails WCC as ally in liberation struggle  By Parker T. Williamson The Presbyterian Layman Wednesday, December 9, 1998
"Today I present to you the country towards whose liberation you struggled, a free Zimbabwe, " said Mugabe to a vigorous applause. "Zimbabwe thanks you, the World Council of Churches!" Mugabe reflected on the diverse cultural composition of the WCC and recognized the Third World delegates who filled the Assembly hall. "Given this diversity and global representativeness, the United Nations, based as it is on dry political and international law principles that pay scant regard to spirituality and morality, must surely take full cognizance of you or otherwise face a real challenger." 'Ambiguous' Christianity The president called Southern Africa's experience of Christianity "an ambiguous one," that encapsulates both "positive" and "warty aspects." "The church lent holiness to one supposedly superior race and its high-handed, exclusionary structures of misgovernence," he said. "Indeed, as Africans, we were children of a lesser God, and we have in our history instances where religious leaders not just provided chaplains to the force of the empire builder, but actually accosted the imperial force to destroy African kingdoms and culture." While acknowledging that they built schools in the bush, providing the only education available to his generation, and hospitals and clinics that still provide almost all the country's rural health care, Mugabe hammered hard on the evil that he said was committed by Christian missionaries. He said that most missionaries came as agents of the "empire builder" who paid them off with land and money "not for sound spiritual reasons, but to use religion as opium to take the indigenous population." Laced with fragments of the phrase first employed by Karl Marx, Mugabe's diatribe against Christian missionaries brought loud and sustained applause from this audience in which "indigenous" has been equated with holiness. The struggle continues Mugabe pointed out that liberation struggles continue in many places around the world and that the Christian church continues to side with the oppressors. He spotlighted the Sandinistas in Nicaragua whom, he said, had stood for the "most oppressed and marginalized and historically exploited." Then Mugabe turned on capitalism and the scourge of debt that it has allegedly foisted upon Third-World countries. He lamented what has happened in the world since "the fall of dommunism," saying that the world is now a "heartless world dominated by bullies. It is a very conservative world where rich nations trample upon poor ones with disgusting impunity, a world where the widow still wails and the orphan still goes without." A 'global consipiracy' Mugabe said it would appear that "there is a global conspiracy against our poor nations and poor people." He listed as evidence of the conspiracy the debt burden, unequal terms of trade, depressed commodity prices, speculative capital, and repeated droughts. All of this, he said, is the result of a "stupendous failure of the human system constructed for our so-called global village." And he asked, "Where is its conscience; where are … our moral and spiritual liberators?" Mugabe said that all Christians were not collaborators with evil. Some, he said, took the role of liberators who were willing to fight against colonial injustices. The WCC, he said, is representative of that kind of Christianity. Revisiting communism A former Marxist who was forced to modify his rhetoric when the Soviet Union fell, Mugabe appears to be returning to communist ideology. In his speech to the WCC, he bemoaned the rise of capitalism, blaming it for his country's post-liberation problems, and saying, "It is difficult to resist the temptation to conclude that perhaps our world would have been a lot better, a lot safer if we had given communism both a spiritual and democratic God than accept rampant capitalism as godly." At this point the Assembly delivered its most enthusiastic applause. Mugabe asked the WCC to help his government continue the struggle against vestiges of colonialism. Specifically, he requested support for his land reclamation policies which he described as returning the land to its people, and he asked that the WCC take on the issue of third-world debt relief. "All we are saying is, can this great Assembly of God find a heart for the underprivileged, landless peasant of Southern Africa?" |
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