'Colonial' memorials removed from Zim cathedral

HARARE -- Racial controversy struck Zimbabwe's Anglican church on Thursday as church authorities ordered the removal from its cathedral of hundreds of plaques and commemorations honouring the dead of "colonial" former Rhodesia.

Parishioners were shocked when they saw workers with scaffolding, hammers, saws and screwdrivers taking down brass plaques lining the walls of the building, the seat of the Anglican church in Zimbabwe.

Large blank spaces were left on the walls where the workers had unscrewed or unbolted dedications to the mostly British and South African pioneers who first settled here in 1890; the dead, both blacks and whites, of the two World Wars; and prominent churchmen, administrators and individuals of the era of white rule that ended when President Robert Mugabe came to power in 1980.

At midday on Thursday a metre-long plaque to the memory of 59 people who died when an Air Rhodesia Viscount airliner was shot down in 1979 by a SAM missile fired by guerillas, was hanging from its bolts from the wall of the cloisters while workers were on their lunch break.

Lawyer and historian Tim Tanser said he found workers dismantling a heavy bronze memorial with the names of the 45 officers and 1007 men of the Transvaal and Rhodesia Regiment, all the Anglicans in the diocese of Central Africa who were killed in the battles of Delville Wood, the Somme, Passchaendaele and Ypres in France in World War 1.

Tanser said the workers were embarrassed when he demanded to know what they were doing.

They told him the plaques were being removed "for cleaning" but then admitted, "we are not going to be putting them back".

"I was burning with anger," he said. "This is desecration. The church was built by the people whose plaques they are removing. It will be so hurtful for the families concerned."

The "colonial relics" in the cathedral have been the source of continuous controversy between blacks and whites since independence, in a church struck by acrimony for its alleged support for the white minority Rhodesian government. -- Sapa-DPA