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The respectable prelate, who is a Zambian, was on an official visit to Bulawayo during the 16-18 December weekend. He said the Anglican Church in his province would never allow or recognise same-sex marriages or homosexual activities.
That was a most welcome statement as it was made at a time when there is a split in the church in Harare. A group led by Bishop Nolbert Kunonga is now called the Independent Anglican Church.
The schism was caused by what Bishop Kunonga felt was either support for or tolerance of homosexual behaviour in or by the church’s leadership.
The Anglican Church has played a very significant role in the social, cultural and economic development of this country from the very early days of its colonisation by the British South Africa Company (BSAC) of Cecil John Rhodes in 1890.
In Matabeleland it founded a number of schools including the famous Cyrene Mission, St Columba’s and St James. It has schools in other provinces as well one of which, St Augustine’s in Manicaland, is historically important to Zimbabwe.
In the 1990s the Anglican church leadership in Zimbabwe got involved in the question of whether or not homosexuals should be allowed not only to marry one another according to the rites of the church but also whether or not they may be supported to become Anglican church leaders.
The issue had much earlier become a “human rights” matter in the western world, and the most senior Anglican Church official, the Archbishop of Canterbury, sounded as if he was being carried away from the Bible and its anti-homosexuality precepts by the libertarian pronouncements of pro-gay individuals, especially some United Kingdom and United States politicians.
Other pro-gay sentiments came from Australia, parts of continental Europe and some sections of the South African and Zimbabwean white communities.
When a homosexual, Gene Robinson, was elected Bishop of an Episcopalian Diocese in New Hampshire in the United States in 2003, many Zimbabwean Christians were stunned. The Anglican Church is called the Episcopalian church in the US and Scotland.
Most Zimbabweans rightly supported President Mugabe who had earlier described homosexuals as “worse than pigs and dogs”. He was looking at the matter from a purely natural point of view. In nature (animals and plants) there are two genders: female and male.
Among mentally normal dogs, bitches and bull-dogs look for each other to mate. In the plant kingdom, pollen from stamens is transferred by insects, birds or the wind to pistils on the flowers. Stamens and pistils represent the male and the female parts of the flower respectively.
It has been argued that some homosexual cases are caused by hormonal imbalances in the people concerned. Granted.
We could liken such cases to victims of physical diseases caused by vitamin deficiency. They include scurvy, beriberi and gingivitis. These are cured by a dietary medical therapy. The argument here is that modern medical science is so advanced that such hormonal imbalances can and should be corrected (or cured) by a medical regimen.
The considered opinion of the author of this article is that the cause of homosexuality is much more in the mind than in the mechanical functioning of the body. It lies in the social environment and cultural norms and values of the people involved.
A look at the historical origins and development of what is called western education takes us to Sparta, one of the early city-states that developed in the Peloponnese in the eighth century BC and was later regarded as a part of the cradle of western civilisation.
In that city-state, originally called Lacedamon (a word whose literal meaning was “hollow land”) we are told by Plutarch that Spartan boys were inducted into the army at the tender age of seven years. Their training was meant to produce hardy patriotic soldiers endowed with the virtues of fortitude, prudence, obedience and temperance.
They lived a collective life in military camps where they slept in twos or threes. They were encouraged to have homosexual relationships based on the bond between the mythical Achilles and Patroclus as narrated in the Iliad. That type of life inevitably led to sexual inversion in adult life.
They were allowed to marry when they turned 20 years. But although married, the Spartan young men culturally frowned on their being seen with women, whatever the relationship.
So it was not until they were 30 years old that they would live a normal husband/wife life with their spouses of 10 years.
Meanwhile, the Spartan girl children were trained from childhood to be wives and mothers in the service of the state more than of their husbands. They too were encouraged to have lesbian attachments.
The Spartan family of that era was not given the same attention that the average Zimbabwean couple does today. Only minimum attention was given as children were weaned off at an early age and taken to centres where they were required to exercise their bodies by wrestling, running, throwing the javelin and the discus, to prepare them for child-bearing.
Those cultural practices where inherited by the Romans after they conquered the Greeks, rendering some aspects of their civilisation effete and adopting some, including the abominable homosexual practices.
Another very bad sexual practice Sparta passed on to Rome was pederasty, a term that means anal intercourse between a man and a boy. This was very common at Greek gymnasia comprising academies, lyceums and cynosarges in the fifth century BC when gymnasia were being established throughout the country.
When Rome took over the civilised world’s leadership mantle, it also established gymnasia, a development which was taken over by the Roman Catholic Church right across the length and breadth of the Roman Empire.
Some Anglican Church leaders continued the highly unchristian practices of homosexuality, lesbianism and pederasty when the Anglicans broke away from the Roman Catholic.
We must understand that those who practise these most unnatural acts are violating one of the basic Mosaic laws, found in the book of Leviticus chapter 18 verse 22, a law that is an integral part of the heart and soul of biblical precepts.
Its origins appear to be traceable to Sparta, then to the Roman Empire, to the seminaries, nunneries, colleges and military establishments of many countries in the western world.
What about Africa south of the Sahara? The region’s traditional beliefs are all focused on fertility, and that means reproduction. Beliefs contradicting these pre-fertility (reproduction) beliefs are taboo.
They are generally referred to as witchcraft: buloyi/ubuthakathi/uroyi. In the olden days, witches were mercilessly killed on orders of the ruling monarch.
The justification for such a verdict against homosexuals and lesbians was that since they did not want to mate with partners of the opposite sex and have children, they hated children.
And since children are the seed from which future human generations spring, homosexuals and lesbians do not want the human race to multiply and hence they engage in anti-reproductive sexual activities, meaning that they are against human life.
They were, ipso facto, not rightly entitled to live. This legal rationale obtains in some African states even today, in particular the predominantly Moslemic ones.
Meanwhile, western and other nations that advocate the protection of the unnatural activities of homosexuals and lesbians and any other form of sexual inversion or perversion are practising some libertarian type of social policy that completely ignores the need to ensure the continued existence of the human race.
It does not make any sense whatsoever to have protagonists of such a satanic policy to lead a government, let alone a Christian church.
How can anyone who is not under an oath of celibacy abhor having children and at the same time want to lead a human community? And not only that, but proceed to take a person of the same gender as himself and call him his wife?
Surely, and again surely Jesus Christ must be writhing with deep pain and acute remorse to hear some of the people who call themselves His followers behaving in such a satanic way, in such an inhuman manner ostensibly to promote their human rights. “What is human” about homosexuality? Nothing.
That is libertarianism gone utterly awry. Christianity is not based on or motivated by libertarianism but by the humane necessity to live a life based on God’s instructions.
Good governments in all Christendom should design policies and enact laws based on necessitarianism rather than libertarianism on this issue of sexual lunacy called homosexuality.
l Saul Gwakuba Ndlovu is a Bulawayo-based retired journalist. He can be contacted on: Cell 0734328136 or through email [email protected]