Death of Bishop Burrough
Paul_J
The Church Times (7th Febuary):
WHEN WHITE-RULED Rhodesia turned into black-led Zimbabwe in April 1980,
the warning voice of the Rt Revd Paul Burrough sounded straight out of the
proverbial wilderness.
Bishop of Mashonaland at that time, he brought ecclesiastical opprobrium
upon himself by refusing to condone the methods that had brought Robert
Mugabe to power, and he earned political condemnation in Britain, and
other parts of the Commonwealth, by famously declaring in an open appeal
to Margaret Thatcher's government in London: "Intimidation and trickery
have sent a wave of fear across this land, causing the people to accept
fraud rather than a return to killing."
In his book The Last Days of Rhodesia, the university lecturer Denis Hills
spoke for the vast majority of commentators when he declared the bishop's
words "puerile and ungracious" in view of what Hills called "Mugabe's
unimpeachable sentiments on peace, non-racialism and racial harmony." Who
looks puerile now?
John Paul Burrough, who died on 27 January, aged 86, was no stranger to
controversy. Born the son of a naval pastor, he went from St Edward's
School, Oxford, to St Edmund's Hall to read English.
At university he was more engaged with the world of sport than libraries,
and physical prowess came in handy when he served in the Second World War,
as a Captain in the Royal Corps of Signals.
Captured by the Japanese in 1942, he was appointed an MBE at war's end for
the leadership qualities he displayed in a series of Japanese POW camps
Wartime experience, and spiritual growth during that time, led Paul
Burrough to seek ordination, and after serving as priest in the Far East,
he returned to England in 1959, when he was invited by Bishop Leonard
Wilson to become his chaplain for overseas people in Birmingham.
It was the year after race riots in Notting Hill Gate. The race situation
in run-down urban areas of the Midlands was explosive, and, for the next
nine years, Paul Burrough played a leading part in a Christian attempt to
welcome non-white immigrants.
He was appointed Hon. Canon of Birmingham Cathedral in 1965, the year that
a former RAF fighter pilot, Ian Douglas Smith, flew so low and so
dangerously over what was left of the British Empire in Southern Rhodesia,
declaring his infamous UDI on 11 November.
Invited to work with a small team of beleaguered Anglicans in the
Mashonaland diocese of Rhodesia, Paul Burrough was bishop there between
1968 and 1981, years during which a rebellion against the Queen turned
into a vicious white-black race war, that led to the death of at least
35.000 people.
Still fresh from magnificent work in Birmingham, Burrough was quick to
condemn the brutality of the Rhodesian forces. But when Burrough went on
to denounce the appalling terror tactics of both Robert Mugabe and Joshua
Nkomo, he was targeted as a Rhodesian propagandist and his life was
threatened twice.
When independence came in 1980, fellow churchmen effectively forced him
out of Zimbabwe, and he never returned to a land he loved.
Never a political animal, Paul Burrough returned to England and from 1981
to 1985 served as an assistant bishop in the diocese of Peterborough.
A cleric who often stood at a different angle to many Christians in
Central and Southern Africa, Paul Burrough left his own modest memoir; a
book called "Angels Unawares". In it. he spoke of what he called "the
total impossibility" of trying to explain the realities of Africa to well
meaning, but often pitifully unaware and far away, British and
Commonwealth observers.
"Christians ought to have said and continued to say that terrorism,
torture, undeclared war and detention without trial are of the devil and
can never ever be justified," he said.
He was as strong against Mugabe as he had been against Smith, and
Zimbabweans will always remember that.