Domesticating a Religious Import: The Jesuits and the Inculturation of the Catholic Church in Zimbabwe, 1879-1980

Preface

Preface This project began with the crisis of trying to find a job. During my senior year at Georgetown University, I happened across a pamphlet advertising volunteer teaching positions with the Catholic Ancillary Teachers of Rural Zimbabwe (Catoruzi). The pamphlet noted that then–Prime Minister Robert Mugabe had asked the Catholic Church to provide teachers for schools in the rural areas. This struck me as odd: why would an alleged Marxist entrust the future of a newly liberated nation to the care of an ostensibly reactionary religious institution? At the time I had no idea that Mugabe had been raised as a Catholic at a Jesuit mission. Four years later, after two years of teaching high school social studies and two years in the novitiate of the Jesuit New York province, I found myself in the M.A. program in American history at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., studying the history of American Catholics of African descent. During a conversation with a fellow graduate student while on a research trip to the Archdiocese of Baltimore’s archives, my colleague expressed surprise that I had completed my undergraduate degree with a concentration in African history rather than American history. In explaining to her the things about African history that I found most interesting, I found myself becoming excited about them anew—and longing to return to African history. Two years later, while working with Catholic Relief Services in Angola, after getting to know and working with missionary priests and the Spanish Hermanas Teresianas (Sisters of Saint Theresa), who dedicated their lives to working among the people at the mission of Mary the Mother of God on the outskirts of Cubal, the kernel of the idea for this project struck: the idea of testing inculturation, or the x | preface adaptation of Christianity to a local culture, as a process of social liberation that paralleled the struggle for political liberation. As with many projects, field research changed the scope and structure of the inquiry. I had originally intended to trace the histories of three Jesuit missions in Zimbabwe and compare them with the histories of three Jesuit missions in Mozambique, using the Jesuits as a control to test the effects of differences in African and European cultures on the inculturation process. Comparing Jesuit missions in Zimbabwe and Mozambique would have provided a means to examine the practical effects of Jesuit spirituality and missiology, as well as differences in European cultures, colonial systems, and mentalities on the inculturation process. While Jesuits in Asia and the Americas were renowned for their efforts to inculturate the church prior to the nineteenth century , inculturation did not appear to be a priority or strategy within the African context prior to the middle of the twentieth century. Jesuit missions, accordingly, are excellent loci for case studies because Ignatian spirituality allows great flexibility and variety in its implementation , thereby ostensibly making it more amenable to inculturation processes within the Catholic Church. Furthermore, the church’s centralized and uniform transnational structures, its emphasis on ritual, and its natural law philosophy and theology mitigated against schisms and the formation of African independent churches, as happened more often with many Protestant churches, thus making it well suited to study African initiatives within the global church and their efforts to transform it.1 I was unable to gain access to the records of the Jesuit missions in Mozambique, located in the Jesuit archives in Lisbon because the archivist, Padre Vital Perreira, a spry septuagenarian, was frequently away from the archives hearing the confessions of the nuns and youth of the city. Additionally, the overabundance of material on Chishawasha Mission, the oldest Catholic mission established in colonial Zimbabwe , versus the virtual nonexistence of material on St. Peter’s Parish, Harare (the oldest urban parish for African Catholics in Harare) in the Jesuit Archives of Zimbabwe necessitated that I revise the structure of this project. Further, the political violence in Zimbabwe following the preface | xi defeat of the constitutional referendum of February 2000 and the parliamentary elections of June 2000 resulted in this project’s current format , for very few laypeople were willing to be interviewed about their experiences during the colonial and chimurenga periods, and even some priests and brothers were afraid to speak. Of the twenty-eight interviews I was able to conduct, only six were with laypeople (four men and two women). Consequently, the current study relies...