History of the Society of Jesus in Zimbabwe

Since the Africa Synod in Rome in the mid 1990s it has been customary to speak of three attempts to evangelize Africa. The first we can associate with Saint Mark, the foundation of the church of Alexandria, the spread up the Nile to Nubia and Ethiopia and west along the coast of North Africa. Saint Augustine attended a synod with some 500 other bishops from North Africa in the early fifth century. But, except for the enclave of Ethiopia, Christianity in Africa virtually disappeared under the onslaught of Islam in the seventh century.

It took almost a thousand years before the second great attempt was made with missionaries arriving in West Africa, the Congo, Angola and Mocambique and it was in this last that our story begins. In 1556, the year Saint Ignatius died, Gonzalo de Silveira, just 30 years old, sailed to India as provincial of the Jesuits in the east. He was not a success. He was energetic but not a good listener. He had to be moved. But where? The decision was made to send him to Africa and he reached Tete in November 1560 and from there proceeded to the court of king Mwene Mutapa, NW of Mutoko near the Mazowe river. The king and his mother became Christians but Muslim traders worked against their influence saying this was a prelude to Portuguese colonial expansion, which was probably true. At any rate Silveira was killed and the mission collapsed.

The third, and finally successful, attempt is associated with the nineteenth century when numerous missionary societies arrived in virtually every corner of Africa. It was on the 10 February 1879 that the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith noted that nothing was being done to preach the gospel in Southern Africa. On the 16th February Leo XIII signed a decree setting up the Zambezi Mission and entrusted it to the Society of Jesus. Two months later, on the 16th April, four ox-wagons containing six priests and five brothers set out from Grahamstown traveling north at the speed of 17 miles a day. They were Fr. Henry Depelchin, (Superior) Fr. Charles Croonenberghs, Br. Francis de Sadeleer and Br. Louis de Vylder, all from Belgium; Fr. Salvatore Blanca and Br. Peter Paravicini from Italy; Fr. Charles Fuchs and Fr. Anthony Teroerde from Germany; Br. Joseph Hedley and Fr. Augustus Law from England and Br. Theodore Nigg from Liechtenstein.

As they moved north they were welcomed by the farmers they met and reached Kimberley on the 11th May. There Depelchin dismissed his guide and refused to augment his team of tired oxen. He wanted to save money. They reached the Limpopo on July 8 and carved a cross high up on a spectacular tree where many travelers, including Livingstone, had halted. It can be seen to this day though the tree is dead. They crossed the Limpopo and ‘for six days journeyed through a dreary waste of thorn bushes, dusty and dry, almost without water and without grass …’ and reached Khama’s capital at Shoshong on the 23 July. The chief was cool to them because he had already welcomed the London Missionary Society and he shrewdly foresaw rivalry if he welcomed another missionary group patently in competition to the Protestants. Depelchin was very disappointed and determined to move on.

They faced many trials. The wagons were often stuck and the oxen fatigued. Those that died had to be replaced at substantial cost. Their drivers deserted them and they had to maneuver the cumbersome vehicles themselves They were frequently dehydrated in the scorching sun and there was a constant threat of wild animals.

On the 17th August they reached the Tati goldfields, in modern Botswana not far from the Zimbabwe border, and received a warm welcome from a trader, George ‘Elephant’ Phillips, an agent for George Westbeech, himself a trader based at Pandamatenga. Depelchin decided to found a mission there, which the Jesuits called Good Hope, on the south bank of the Tati river. It was the first mission of our province.

Depelchin went on north to Gubulawayo and reached Lobengula’s capital on the 2nd September. He set about gaining permission to stay and – in a gesture reminiscent of Mateo Ricci’s clocks – the Jesuits obtained this by repairing and painting the king’s wagon. The Jesuit mission of the Sacred Heart in Gubulawayo was not a success. Attempts at education came to nought and the king decreed that no one was to adopt the Christian faith. It struggled on until 1887 when it was moved by Fr Prestage to Empandeni where he had obtained permission to start a school. While Good Hope was the first mission of our province Empandeni is the oldest still existing to this day though no longer run by us.

Depelchin was disappointed by the slow progress of relations with Lobengula and decided to send two additional expeditions – one to Mzila’ Shangaan people in the east and one to Lewanika’s Barotsi in the north. Both the Shangaan and the Barotsi were enemies of the Ndebele so these moves did little to commend the Jesuits to all three peoples. Depelchin’s decision ‘committed the Zambezi missionary enterprise to failure.’ (Burrett)

Another reason for failure was the Jesuits’ lack of care for the health of their members. Depelchin sent people into fever areas without any awareness of what he was doing. And the irony is that it was the Jesuits in South America who had brought the world’s attention to the anti-malarial qualities of quinine.

What could go wrong did go wrong on the journey to Mzila’s. Fr Law, Br Hedley, Br de Sadeleer and a new arrival, Fr Karl Wehl, set out on the 28th May 1880. Fr Wehl got separated from his three companions and was lost for a month. The rains set in and the wagons got stuck, food ran out and malarial fever weakened the health of all three. They abandoned the wagons and arrived at Mzila’s on foot on the 31 August in an exhausted state. Mzila did not welcome them and Fr. Law died of exhaustion on the 25 November. The three remaining Jesuits lived in squalor and starvation until 19 April 1881 when two of them struggled to Sofala on the Mocambique coast where they obtained supplies. But Fr Wehl died there in his weakened state and Br de Sadeleer then returned to Mzila’s with supplies and he and Br Hedley struggled back to Gubulawayo arriving 1 October 1881, sixteen months after they had set out and having accomplished ‘nothing.’

The journey to the north fared little better. On the 17 May 1880 Depelchin. Frs Terorde and Weisskopf, with Brs Nigg, Vervenne and Simonis set out for the Zambezi and settled at Pandematenga where the trader Westbeech had his station. Depelchin decided to start work with the Tonga people but did not realize that the Tonga feared both the Ndebele to the south and the Barotse to the north. Any co-operation with the strangers might incur the wrath of either kingdom. They persevered and eventually obtained permission to start a mission at Mwemba’s settlement on the north bank of the Zambezi. Mwemba soon tired of their presence and it seems tried to poison them. At any rate Fr Terorde died in agony on the 16th or 17th of September 1880. Br Vervenne was very ill but able to bury Fr Terorde. At this point Br Nigg arrived and after threatening the chief carried away Br Vervenne in a hammock.

Depelchin, though ill with malaria, determined to press on and sent messages to Lewanika of the Barotse who invited him to come the following year, 1881. They made the journey and were welcomed and promised land for a mission station. Depelchin returned south to gather more men and supplies but he was now weak from his exertions and the constant malaria. Besides a number of his companions died from fever or accidents and he returned to Europe somewhat desolate. Attempts were made to follow up both on the Mwemba mission and the one to Lewanika but neither succeeded.

That left Pandamatenga, but again illness, poor relations with the trader, Westbeech, and lack of success in interesting the local people all came together to close the mission in 1885. Fr Peter Prestage remained at Tati but there was a general lull in missionary work in the mid 1880s. He used his time in building, farming, cattle breeding and learning Zulu. In 1884 he moved to Gubulawayo and the following year Tati mission was closed.

In 1886 Prestage eventually persuaded Lobengula to allow him to start a school at Empandeni but the new superior, Fr Alfred Weld, decided a period of consolidation was called for and ordered the withdrawal of all Jesuits from Matabeleland. Prestage accordingly withdrew but he begged Weld to allow him to return and the latter eventually gave in. In 1887 Frs Prestage and Andrew Hartmann built up Empandeni and classes began in the school. But the signing of the Rudd Concession soured relations between Lobengula and the Europeans and the Jesuits felt they had to withdraw for a time and they left a caretaker in charge of the mission. This was chapter one, the ‘end of the beginning,’ of the Zambezi Mission. It is easy for us to look back and see clearly the mistakes that were made:

●     Depelchin moved too rapidly without consolidating the foundations he made.
●     He spread his men too thin so that in the case of illness or accident they were stretched to the limit.
●    He ignored the health of his people and continually established missions in fever-ridden places.
●    He also ignored the health of his oxen and saved money on the wrong things.
●    He did not reflect on the political realities on the ground, especially the rivalries between the major powers in Zambezia.
●    He misunderstood the attitudes of the traders and often did not succeed in winning their co-operation.
●    As a man of his age he shared the same rivalries between the churches he must have experienced in Europe. He was unable to move beyond these.

The English and German Provinces
1890 was the year Rhodes’ expedition came to claim the land between the Zambezi and the Limpopo. His claim was based on a flimsy agreement with Lobengula, which Rhodes interpreted liberally. However the colonial presence created an environment that allowed the Jesuits and the Dominican sisters to begin their mission with greater confidence. A residence was established in Salisbury in 1890 and the first mission in Mashonaland at Chishawasha in 1892.

In 1894 the Society decided to entrust the mission to the English province although many of the Jesuits who came from other countries stayed on. Despite the wars of the first decade of colonialism it was a hectic period of expansion. Missions, schools and parishes were established in Bulawayo (1894), St George’s (Bulawayo 1896), Gokomere (1896), Mutare (1899), Embakwe (1902), Gweru (1903), Chikuni (1905), Kasisi (1905), Driefontein (1906), St Joseph’s Hama (1908), Katondwe (1910), St Peter’s Mbare (1910), etc. In 1927 authority was delegated from London to a Mission Superior on the spot and in 1930, the first bishop was consecrated, Bishop Aston Chichester.

There were always a large number of Germans among the Jesuits in this country and they felt they needed their own area in order to focus their efforts and give identity to the support they knew would come from Germany. (When I first arrived I met Frs Kaibach and Esser who were in the evening of their lives and who had come out from Germany around the time of WWI. They had never been home. Home leave only came in 1960.) The establishment of a German area was planned in the 1930s but the war delayed it. It was not to be until 1957 that the East German province took over the Sinoia (Chinhoyi) Mission. Within a few years they built missions in Guruve (1958), St Albert’s Mission and school (1962), Karoi (1963), Chitsungo (1964), Magondi (1964), Banket (1970) and St Boniface Hurungwe (1970).

The liberation war is normally dated from 1972-79 and during that period there was very little development in bricks. There were other kinds of development which I will touch on in a moment.

The Zimbabwe Jesuit Province
By the late 1970s we felt it was time for us to come back together again and Fr General Pedro Arrupe called us to form one province in 1978. Both missions were beginning to receive vocations locally and we wanted to combine our resources in responding to this new phase in our story. Our first son-of-the-soil provincial is our present one who was appointed in 2001. We set up a novitiate in the same year that we established the new province (1978) although we decided in 1983, since our number of novices were so small, to join with Zambia/Malawi and Eastern Africa in a joint novitiate in Lusaka.

The most significant recent development has been the establishment of the college of which you are now part. The late Fr Donal McKenna and I started Arrupe House in 1990 as a Juniorate to prepare those who completed their novitiate in Lusaka to go to the French speaking Philosophate in Kinshasa. A few years later, in 1994, this little baby grew into the Arrupe College we know today.

Some characteristics of our province
1.    Education has been a thrust of the Society’s mission since 1546 and our province has been no exception. When I first arrived (1966), besides the basic pastoral work of the missions and parishes, we were responsible for a Teacher Training College (St Paul’s Musami), six secondary schools (St George’s, St Ignatius, St Paul’s Musami, St Albert’s, Makumbi and St Peter’s Kubatana, which was also a technical school) and primary schools in all the missions.
    
2.    It is only comparatively recently that we have overcome a certain tension among us between those who worked mainly among whites and those who worked mainly among blacks. In the 90 years of colonial rule it often happened that a Jesuit who was assigned to work on the missions stations had little good to say about his own brethren working at St George’s, which catered on the whole for whites. There is a letter in the archives from the founder of Mount St Mary’s mission, Wedza, Fr Boekenhof (sp.?), complaining that money spent on leveling the sports fields at St George’s could build two boarding hostels at his mission. (He is the one who was asked by Bishop Chichester how much he needed to start Mount St Mary’s. “I’ll need 25 pounds, Your Grace.” “I’ll give you twenty, Boekenhof!”) Similarly people assigned to St George’s who had all the responsibility of a big college often knew little about life on the missions – to say nothing of the language. I say ‘tension’ because I do not think it amounted to division. There was always an underlying unity of sorts.

3.    The tension I refer to was most acute during the war when St George’s was conducting funerals for their old boys while missions and mission schools were conducting other funerals for their former students who were on the opposing side. And it the midst of this seven Jesuits were killed in four different incidents Suspicions of the motives and of who were the killers differed according to where you worked and who you worked with. Yet the key point here, now that the dust has settled is that our province has these martyrs. They are part of our story and we are proud of them. They were ordinary Jesuits. If you knew them you would not say they stood out especially from anyone else. Maybe we too have courage we don’t know about.

4.    Involvement in Justice and Peace. We were not vocal at the time – in the 1920s and 30s – when segregationist structures were being put in place. I suppose there is no great consensus among us as to why this was so. Personally I believe it was something to do with a lack of nerve in a church still recovering from being a persecuted minority in the UK for four centuries. But a high point in our witness to the gospel was the involvement of the province in the Justice and Peace Commission in the 1970s. Both Dieter Scholz and Fidelis Mukonori, as well as Paddy Moloney and a number of others were involved in one way or another. We contributed to publication that drew the attention of the world to the sufferings of the people and irritated the Rhodesian Government. Dieter was arrested twice and eventually deported. But besides this high point there were also other initiatives in social justice in which the province was involved over many years. Both the School of Social work and Silveira House were started in 1964 through the initiatives of individual Jesuits and the imagination of the Mission Superior of the time, Fr. Terrence Corrigan. There are other initiatives that could be mentioned, like the work with street children (Canisius Chishiri) and in communications (Oskar Wermter and Nigel Johnson) but today we have quite a lot of direct work with people suffering from HIV and AIDS.

5.    We can also claim to have worked in the area of the intellectual apostolate and inculturation. The early Jesuits produced some of the earliest dictionaries in Ndebele (Fr O’Neill) and Shona (Fr Hartmann). And the late Fr Michael Hannan, who died in 1977, was awarded a Doctorate for his production of a detailed modern Shona dictionary. I remember it was reviewed under the heading SIX PAGES ON ‘WALK.’ In those days nearly all Jesuits were smokers and Mike Hannan used to smoke a brand where the bottom of the packet was a clean white space. On this he used to write any word that he heard that was new to him. When he eventually sat down to write the dictionary his raw material was a mountain of used cigarette boxes.

We ran the Regional Seminary from its inception in 1936 until 1976 and are still involved in teaching there and we have had Jesuits teaching at the national university as well as Hekima and the Biblical Institute in Rome.

6.    Finally a word about our Brothers. You may have noticed that of the eleven who first came to this country in 1979 five were brothers. Clearly the early planners knew the essential role the brothers would play in setting up the mission. And so it was. Ever since then we have had brothers who were builders, carpenters, mechanics, farmers, metal smiths, printers, bookbinders, plumbers, gardeners, administrators, etc. Next time you enter the old Chishawasha church or pass through the gates of the cemetery there, pause to ponder who was it built this church or crafted these gates. We have few entering these days to become brothers because the identity of the brother has shifted and there is some ignorance about the beauty of the brother’s vocation. But perhaps greater clarity will emerge in time but that is another subject.

• Note. For the early history of our province I am indebted to the work of Rob Burrett, The Zambezi Mission and the residences of Good Hope and the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Old Tati, in Botswana Notes and Records, Volume 32, and to Richard Randolph SJ, 1985, Dawn in Zimbabwe, Mambo Press.
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• By Fr. David Harold-Barry S.J.
  
  

Nevertheless, the Society of Jesus is an international organization that is present in over 100 countries. The Society of Jesus was founded in 1540 by a Spaniard called Ignatius of Loyola. As a youth, Ignatius was wild and stubborn, given over to the pursuit of worldly glory in military conquest. His hopes to rise up through the ranks of the Spanish nobility were dashed when, fighting in a battle against the French, he was wounded by a canon ball that brought an end to his military career. During his convalescence in his family castle of Loyola, Ignatius had a profound experience of God that converted him to the service of the Lord and radically changed the course of his life.

After his conversion, Ignatius spent the next few years wandering around as a pilgrim, devoting himself to prayer and penance and seeking the will of God. His overriding desire was “to help souls.” Eventually he realized that in order to be able to do this he would have to get an education. After completing his studies at the University of Paris, he gathered about himself some companions whom he trained in his Spiritual Exercises, a redaction of his own intense conversion to the service of the Lord.

In 1540, Ignatius and his eight companions petitioned the Pope in Rome for permission to found a new religious order, with the name “Society of Jesus.” Permission was duly granted, and thus the Society of Jesus was formed, with the primary intention of “helping souls.” Very quickly, Ignatius gathered many more followers, and the Society of Jesus began to grow at an exponential rate. Today the Society of Jesus has just under 20,000 members, which makes it the largest male religious order in the world.