Kairos consciousness and the christian response to the Zimbabwean crisis (2000 - 2013)

Abstract

This study is based on the contemporary Christian Church’s response to the Zimbabwean crisis for the period 2000 to 2013 through the lenses of Kairos Consciousness as articulated by Allan Boesak. The framework of this study constitutes a liberationist perspective and is, thus, armed with insights from liberation paradigm in its broadest sense analysing the significant role of the church in contemporary Zimbabwean society. The research was analysed through Kairos Consciousness which implies that the marginalised, the powerless, the ghetto people, the masses occupy the central epistemological space in this ecclesiological discourse. Further, Kairos consciousness is a liberationist framework of ecclesiology, when the church becomes the interlocutor and articulator identified and associated with non-persons and marginalised. Fundamentally, Kairos consciousness is probing liberationist questions as to what the church has not done in post-independent Zimbabwe. Crucially, this discourse is categorically liberationist, hence black liberation theology starts when there is pain, the cries of the voiceless, the impoverished, those who go to bed without a meal. This study strongly argues that Kairos Consciousness existed in Zimbabwe when the church joined the masses in the liberation struggle. The days when the church was called ‘the church of the struggle in trenches and combat with the marginalised people’. The church actively participated in Chimurenga (armed struggle). However, the attainment of political independence silenced the prophetic voice of the church. Possibly, the black government partnered the church in coming up with a shared horizon on some post-armed struggle themes such as reconciliation, reconstruction, education, nation-building and peacebuilding. The research investigates the ambivalent that the attainment of political independence also meant the emergence of the black elite, the minority who hold the epicentre of power and control of political and economic spaces at the expense of the majority impoverished. Hence, the Christian church rose from the slumber of silence to challenge this injustice. This thesis is developed in the context of the Zimbabwean ecclesiology as an appraisal to some action by the church as responsive to the crisis in Zimbabwe. In addition, the study also makes an in-depth analysis on what was behind the smokescreen in Zimbabwe, particularly the genesis of the Third Chimurenga (land restoration) in the year 2000, economic meltdown, Operation Murambatsvina (restore order), and political violence. These issues, in Zimbabwe, inevitably called for a critical engagement between ecclesiology and political discourses. Subsequently, the problem under spotlight has seen the political discourses calling the church to shy away from the public space, perpetuating a myth that the church must not be involved in politics. Crucially, the landmarks of the study are meant to realign our ecclesiologies to current conceptual challenges in Zimbabwe, a society broken by conflict and crisis. In other words, the Zimbabwean crisis calls for a church with Kairos Consciousness whose theological roadmap is based on the wounds, pain and dehumanisation of the marginalised. Therefore, the main thrust of the church brings the marginalised people to the centre and first business of its existence. Over and above all odds, this study also made a ground-breaking contribution to theology exploiting some possibilities to integrate the African philosophy of Ubuntu and ecclesiology in Zimbabwe as a positive move towards creating Africanness community promoting moral fibre and realigning a genuine African church.