The Bible, the Bullet, and the Ballot

Zimbabwe: The Impact of Christian Protest in Sociopolitical Transformation, ca. 1900–ca. 2000

Moyo

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781630879112
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book provides a balanced account of the role of Christians, Christian organizations, and churches in sociopolitical transformation over the bedrock of colonial and nationalist politics in the past century in Zimbabwe. The work explores the broader social and political impact of prominent African Christian clergy who were sociopolitical activists such as Ndabaningi Sithole, Abel Muzorewa, and Canaan Banana. It also highlights the role of missionaries who contributed to the African struggle for independence such as Ralph Edward Dodge, Donal Lamont, and Garfield Todd. The work further explores the contributions of African nationalist parties and prominent politicians with Christian roots, such as Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe, in the struggle for independence, and their contribution in the postcolonial era in light of their Christian heritage and the collective pre-independence nationalist ideals on nation-building and national unity.

1

Introduction

Personally I believe the European has a god in whom he believes and whom he is representing in his churches all over Africa. He believes in the god whose name is spelt Deceit. He believes in a god whose law is “ye strong, you must ‘civilise’ the ‘barbarous’ Africans with machine guns. Ye Christian Europeans you must ‘Christianize’ the pagan Africans with bombs, poison gases, etc!”

In the colonies the Europeans believe in the god that commands “Ye administrators, make Sedition Bill to keep the African gagged, make Deportation Ordinance to send the Africans to exile whenever they dare to question your authority make an ordinance to grab his money so that he cannot stand economically.1

Overall Field of Study

Written by the Sierra Leonean journalist, activist and politician Isaac TA Wallace-Johnson (1895–1965) and published in Ghana’s African Morning Post in 1936 by Nnamdi Azikiwe (1904–1996), who would later become Nigeria’s first African President, the article led to the detention of both men by Ghana’s colonial government. In the cradle of African nationalism, this expression of African sociopolitical grievances depicted Christianity as expressly part of the colonial machinery. The stance of Wallace-Johnson and Azikiwe’s highlights the growing strength of African feeling in the middle decades of the twentieth century about the relationship between Christianity and colonialism, which was shared by participants in movements for African independence, and was reflected in the work of later scholars.

This work explores the vexed relationship between Christianity and colonialism, especially in the last twenty years of white rule in what is now Zimbabwe.2 The title, The Bible, the Bullet and the Ballot, captures the range of forces that were at work in the nationalist movement at the time. The book seeks to assess the justification of the negative evaluation of the influence of Christianity on Africans in the late colonial period in relation to Zimbabwe. In order to do this, a detailed exploration of the role of the Zimbabwean Christian community in the wider political engagement against colonialism between c. 1960 and 1980 is offered. The approach of the church3, and institutions to which Christians belonged, to the questions of universal suffrage and the armed struggle will be of particular concern. Between these three fundamental issues, the “Bible” representing Christianity, the “Bullet” representing the armed struggle, and the “Ballot” universal suffrage or the struggle for democracy, there was a complex interplay.

Christianity, together with its institutions and adherents, were an important part of the wider sociopolitical narrative in Zimbabwe of the struggle for the restitution of Africans’ political rights. The specific sociopolitical developments within the historical period under discussion will be explored, alongside the responses of representatives of the Christian community.

Colonialism has been identified as an aspect of imperialism, in which an imperial power imposes its control, and takes legal sovereignty, of a territory without a process of widespread settlement.4 Although colonization can be part of the process of colonialism, such as the extensive white settlement in Kenya or Zimbabwe, it is not always a feature. The level of white settlement in places like Botswana, Malawi and Zambia was significantly lower than that of Zimbabwe.5

The attitudes of scholars to the role of Christianity in colonialism are considerably varied. In 1967 the Kenyan academic Ali Mazrui asserted, “Just as Augustine had allied Christianity with a concept of Pax Romana, so did Christianity later come to be linked to the whole vision of Pax Britannica. In Africa Christianity came to be particularly associated with colonization.”6 In 1980, he went further, “The God of Love was mobilized behind the mask of ‘imperial pacification.’ The message of Christianity discouraged Africans not only from fighting each other but also from resisting the colonial presence.”7

Others share this wholly negative perspective on the involvement of Christianity in colonialism. Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth declared, “[W]e should place DDT, which destroys parasites, carriers of diseases, on the same level as Christianity . . . The church in the colonies is a white man’s church, a foreigners’ church. It does not call the colonized to ways of God, but to the ways of the white man, to the ways of the master, the ways of the oppressor.”8

Claire Robertson observes how agents of Christianity often preceded and encouraged colonial advance, “If they found their progress in making converts impeded on occasion, they sometimes promoted political control to put them in a better position to succeed. Thus the missionary played a critical role in perpetuating the idea of ‘the white man’s burden’ as a justification for European conquest.”9

Based on their researches of the interaction between colonialism and Christianity on the border of South Africa and Botswana John and Jean Comaroff have stressed the correspondence between Christian mission and secular colonialism, arguing that conversion and civilization were “two sides of the same coin.”10 Although not all missionaries held the same view, missions were representative of colonial values, “From early on, the colonial evangelists gave up in practice, if not always in their public pronouncements, on the fragile distinction between salvation and civilization, between the theological and the worldly sides of their mission.”11 So too Richard Gray in The Colonial Moment observes of missionaries in Southern Africa, “most missions with a few notable exceptions, welcomed the extension of colonial rule”12 and “White supremacy . . . seemed to many missionaries working there almost to be part of God’s establishing order.”13 On this construction, mission-founded churches, with vested interests in the colonial establishment, would be unlikely partners of movements for African independence. The Comaroffs’ view stands in contrast to the more nuanced app...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: The Early Colonial Period, ca. 1880–1959
• Chapter 3: The Development of Radical African Politics in Zimbabwe, ca. 1960–1964
• Chapter 4: Growing Nationalist Frustration
• Chapter 5: Zimbabwean Church in Protest
• Chapter 6: Concerted Efforts toward Bringing Independence
• Chapter 7: The Coming of Independence
• Chapter 8: The Postcolonial Aftermath
• Glossary
• Bibliography