May 21, 2009
By Mary Frances Schjonberg

BERKELEY, California – For Anglicans in the Diocese of Harare, Zimbabwe, Holy Week and Eastertide have been a time of new beginnings, and interim Bishop Sebastian Bakare has a bag of chains in his office as proof.

The chains, now broken, once locked the doors to the Harare cathedral preventing Anglicans from worshipping in their church. Bakare led worship in the cathedral on Easter Sunday for the first time since coming to the diocese in December 2007. It was, he told Episcopal News Service, "our resurrection Sunday."

That feeling of new life continues to deepen in the embattled diocese that is recovering from the effects of Bishop Nolbert Kunonga's episcopacy and finding ways to minister in a country being ruined by a dictatorial president.

The Rev. Canon Chad Nicholas Gandiya, Africa regional desk officer for USPG: Anglicans in Mission, was elected May 2 to be the diocese's next bishop, and on May 26, the Zimbabwe high court will hear arguments in the long-standing dispute over who owns the diocese's assets.

Kunonga was deposed in 2007 after illegally separating from the Anglican Province of Central Africa and installing himself as archbishop of Zimbabwe. He had said that he left because the province failed to condemn the ordination of homosexual bishops, an excuse that Ruth Bakare called a "pretext" and a "gimmick."

Kunonga is an avid supporter of Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe, who has let the country slide into ruin during his 28-year rule. Kunonga has also supported the intimidation and persecution of Anglicans in Zimbabwe for opposing his and Mugabe's leadership.

The Bakares say that Zimbabweans have faced years of political repression under Mugabe along with a total collapse of the economy and disruption of basic necessities such as electricity, water and sewage service. During the last round of elections Mugabe attempted to intimidate both opposition politicians and ordinary voters by such tactics as arrests, disappearances, beatings, residential arsons and murder.

"The lucky ones had their arms cut off," the bishop said, adding that Zimbabweans were "butchered by the ruling party."

In early 2008, a statement from Lambeth Palace said that Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams condemned "unequivocally the use of state machinery to intimidate" Kunonga's opponents. The statement also noted that Kunonga has "consistently refused to maintain appropriate levels of independence from the Zimbabwean Government."

"People were fed up with his methods," Bakare said of Kunonga. "He was a dictator. He didn't give lay people a chance to express themselves."

"It's untraditional to argue with a bishop and so you say, ‘yes, my lord,' but underneath it's ‘no, my lord,'" the bishop said, explaining that his culture's inclination to respect people in certain positions "makes it possible even for dictators to thrive when they exploit that kind of traditional understanding of authority and power."

Ruth Bakare, who sees her call as working with the women of the diocese, said that "they were ready to take charge, but they weren't used to it" because they had "quite a bit of experience of dictatorship as well from the previous bishop's wife" who ran the Mothers' Union in Zimbabwe.

Sebastian and Ruth Bakare spoke with ENS at Church Divinity School of the Pacific (CDSP) where they will each receive honorary degrees May 22 for being, in the words of their degree citation, "tireless workers for justice" who "have each exercised a prophetic and pastoral witness to all whom and with whom they serve."

The Bakares spent time at CDSP in the early 1980s. When they returned to Zimbabwe, Bakare worked as a university chaplain for 13 years and had other parochial ministry before being chosen as bishop of the Zimbabwean Diocese of Manicaland in 1999. He served there until he retired in 2006. Ruth Bakare was diocesan president of the Mothers' Union during that time. They returned to active ministry in November 2007 after Kunonga's deposition.

While prompted by other specific causes, the work the Bakares faced in reorganizing the diocese is similar to that encountered thus far in the four Episcopal Church dioceses in which the leadership and at least some part of the membership have left the diocese, but are still in possession of diocesan assets.

When the bishop came back to Harare to "sort out the mess" left by Kunonga, as Ruth Bakare put it, he had no diocesan records, no offices, no staff, no car and no churches or other assets.

"I had a briefcase," he said.

He also had the expectation that only a few Anglicans would answer his call to join him in reorganizing the diocese. Instead, he said, he found that resentment against Kunonga ran deep and people were ready to change the diocese.

Bakare wrote to the diocese's parishes, asking them to declare by a date certain whether or not they would stay with Kunonga. Not all of the parishes received the letter due to the rural isolation in parts of the diocese and the breakdown of civic services such as mail delivery. Just 12 parishes were represented at the first meeting the Bakares had in Harare. That meeting took place in the apartment that had been rented for them in the Zimbabwe capital city, Ruth Bakare recalled.

Over the next three weeks, they were able to contact the other parishes and at the next meeting "we weren't prepared for such a big turnout." Most of the diocese's priests remained in the diocese, as well.

Meanwhile, Kunonga was ordaining his own priests, but eventually some of them asked Bakare if they could rejoin the diocese. He has allowed them to do so, under certain conditions. On a Sunday they must tear up their priestly collars in the presence of their former parish and ask the members for a seat in the congregation, he said. They also must agree that becoming a priest requires completing theological studies, something that Bakare said Kunonga was not requiring.

Bakare said his aim at his early meetings with the remaining Anglicans was to "cool down" the members' anger at Kunonga and to instill in the laity the understanding that "the church was theirs; the bishop comes and goes, but church is left behind and therefore it was their responsibility to see that their church continued."

The Bakares soon saw that the Anglicans, despite their anger, "just wanted now to start a diocese that would be involved in doing the mission of the church," the bishop said.

Nearly 15,000 people came to a Harare sports arena for the bishop's installation, which could not be held in the Harare cathedral because Kunonga still claimed ownership of the Anglican churches despite being officially excommunicated in May 2008. The primates, or leaders, of the Anglican Communion's province said in a February 2009 statement about Zimbabwe's economic and socio-political breakdown that they do not recognize Kunonga as a bishop within the Anglican Communion, and they called for "the full restoration of Anglican property within Zimbabwe to the Church of the Province of Central Africa."

The Zimbabwe High Court, one rank below the country's Supreme Court, ruled in May 2008 that both Kunonga's followers and the Anglicans must have access to church property. Instead, the Bakares said, Mugabe's police prevented Anglicans from entering church property, at times dragging people out of worship services to beat them and or to arrest them.

"It's painful when the rule of law really means nothing anymore," Ruth Bakare said.

Harare Anglicans shut out of their churches have had to "worship in some very odd places" such as on the front lawn of a private home "with the veranda being the high altar," the bishop said. The cathedral congregation worshipped at a public swimming pool. At first some Anglicans were able to worship in schools, but then the police chased them out of those buildings too.

"It was really church on the move," he said.

It wasn't just that people could not use their churches. Anglicans were intimidated on their way to church and sometimes pulled away from services and beaten, according to the Bakares.

In at least one instance the bishop was nearly arrested while presiding at a Sunday Eucharist. Ruth Bakare recounts being part of an annual Mothers' Union gathering in 2008 of nearly 3,000 women that was broken up by two truckloads of riot police, despite the court ruling that called for sharing of church facilities. After trying to continue their program while being watched by the police, the women were told to leave or face the consequences, Ruth Bakare said.

"The women got up and started praying" as they left the area, she said. "It was a combination of tears and joy and trying to say we're not giving up even though we are being chased away," she said.

Despite the experience of the 2008 gathering, or perhaps because of it, 9,000 women attended this year's Mary Day celebration, the Bakares said.

Bishop Bakare said women have been arrested more often than men in the disputes with the riot police. He recalled seeing women pointing their fingers in the faces of the armed riot police or actually taking the officers' guns away from them. Bakare also knows of a woman who returned to church three weeks after she was chased from her church and beaten so severely by police that she lost the child she was carrying.

"To me that was too much to expect," the bishop said.

"It helped my faith, these women. They really deepened my faith; they gave me courage," he said. "If they can do that, why shouldn't I? Women have been a source of inspiration in what I have been going through."

The riot police's tactics came to a head earlier this year, the Bakares said. The diocese sued the police commissioner general and the minister for home affairs for allowing police to violate the court order calling for equal access to church properties. When the government officials did not show up for the hearing, the court ruled in favor of the diocese.

The bishop said he took the court ruling to the police commissioner who signed it but denied that he knew anything about the officers' intimidation tactics. He sent copies of the order to all the parishes in the diocese.

He said he then told the 9,000 Mothers' Union members gathered for this year's Mary Day celebration that the diocese "had reached a point of no return" and that they should all attempt to attend their churches the next day, which was the Sunday before Palm Sunday.

The bishop said that the police had infiltrated the Mothers' Union gathering and thus were prepared to prevent Anglicans from entering their churches the next morning. The police stopped some from worshipping in their buildings and, in other places, they lobbed tear gas into the churches, he said. In at least one instance, the police used live ammunition to disperse worshippers. A bystander was shot in the hand during the incident, the bishop said, and five priests were arrested.

The tear-gas tactics backfired in one neighborhood when the wind, which the bishop called a gift from God, blew the noxious fumes into nearby homes. "That provoked community reaction against the police," Bakare said.

The next morning the bishop protested the actions to the minister of home affairs, taking with him an unexploded tear-gas canister. The government saw that it had a potentially large embarrassment on their hands and ordered the police to stop interfering with Anglicans trying to worship the next Sunday, Bakare said.

Not all the police got word of the order, however. While the bishop was able to lead a Palm Sunday service in the Harare township of Highfields, the cathedral congregation could only worship in the parish hall. However, the bishop said that after the service the members called a locksmith and had the chains removed from the doors to the church.

Thus, Bakare and the cathedral congregation worshipped together for the first time in the cathedral on Easter Sunday this year.

"A lot of people cried," he said. "It was a new beginning."

The Bakares said that the diocese has grown remarkably as Anglicans have returned to their parishes, but that numerical growth is not as important as the depth of spiritual growth that the members have achieved.

The struggles have suggested to the bishop that "maybe the church needs to be persecuted in order to understand what it means to be Christian, to know what the cross means."

Meanwhile, the chains from the cathedral's doors are in a bag in Bakare's office as a reminder.

Episcopal News Service
The Rev. Mary Frances Schjonberg is national correspondent for the Episcopal News Service.