When seven Zimbabweans announced on October 4 that they were suing the Church of England for enabling the brutal abuse they suffered at the hands of John Smyth, a leading figure in its evangelical movement, their action was not only about justice for the past. It was an indictment of an institution that has never reckoned with the violence it spread under the banner of faith.

Smyth was not an isolated predator. He was part of the Church’s powerful inner circle. A respected British barrister as well as an evangelical leader, he oversaw Christian camps in the United Kingdom, Zimbabwe and South Africa, where more than 100 boys and young men were abused. He embodied the authority and social privilege that shielded him from scrutiny. When reports of his abuse first surfaced in England in the early 1980s, the Church chose silence over accountability, allowing him to carry his cruelty to Africa. In Zimbabwe, his victims were boys from Christian camps, among them 16-year-old Guide Nyachuru, who was found dead in a camp swimming pool in 1992. More than three decades later, Nyachuru’s family has joined six other survivors in a lawsuit against the Church, demanding accountability for both the abuse and the Church’s deliberate inaction.

That history has now returned to haunt the Church. What began as the concealment of one man’s crimes has become a symbol of a much older truth: the Church of England’s authority in Africa was never only spiritual. It was built on conquest, complicity and the sanctification of empire.

On November 7, 2024, the Makin Review, an independent inquiry established to investigate the abuse perpetrated by Smyth, delivered its long-awaited findings. The report was damning. It revealed how senior Church figures had systematically concealed his crimes for decades, treating him as “a problem solved and exported to Africa”.

Four days later, Archbishop Justin Welby resigned, accepting both personal and institutional responsibility for what survivors described as a decades-long conspiracy of silence. His departure marked a symbolic moment of accountability but offered little comfort to those who endured Smyth’s brutality.........

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