'The Color of the Skin doesn't Matter'

Janice Mclaughlin

Description

Sr Janice McLaughlin (1942-2021) was a remarkable woman, an American Maryknoll nun who dedicated her life to the twin causes of education and justice. This memoir, completed just before her death, tells her story with refreshing candor. Acknowledging her naivety, which so often gives sustenance to idealism and the drive for a better world, she wanted to be a part of the struggles for freedom and independence in Africa. Trained as a journalist, she first began work in East Africa in 1969. Eight years later, she came to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), to work as press secretary for the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace at the height of the liberation war. Here, her outrage at the brutality of the Rhodesian regime led her to be denounced as a 'terrorist sympathiser'. She was imprisoned and deported. This defining incident led her to the ZANLA camps in Mozambique where she worked as an educator. 

Sr Janice spent four decades of her life in Africa, mainly in Zimba­bwe. Celebrating the country's independence in 1980, she was consistently committed to work in social justice with the newly developed ZIMFEP schools, at Silveira House, and with marginal­ised communities. As Bishop Dieter Scholz points out in his Foreword, she did not evade the hard truth that after forty years the new regime has not fulfilled its promises to create greater equality of opportunity for the disadvantaged; she continued to work for a better, kinder and happier world. 

Sujets

• Africa
• History
• General
• The Women
• Woman
• South
• General officer
• Postcolonialism
• Women
• Histoire
• Social Activists

Informations

• Publié par: Modjaji Books
• Date de parution: 02 août 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781779224040
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

‘The Color of the Skin doesn’t Matter’
‘The Color of the Skin doesn’t Matter’
A Missioner’s Tale of Faith and Politics
Janice Mclaughlin, MM
Published by Weaver Press, Box A1922, Avondale, Harare. 2021 < www.weaverpresszimbabwe.com >
© Sister Janice McLaughlin and the Maryknoll Sisters of St. Dominic, Inc. 2021
Typeset by Weaver Press Cover Design: Farai Wallace, Harare.
The title was inspired by the late Commander Josiah Tongogara (1938-79)
The majority of the photographs are from Sister Janice’s personal archive, many were, we understand, taken by Sister Janice herself. Others are drawn from the Maryknoll Archive in New York. Grateful thanks are due to Stephanie Conning and Jennifer Halloran for their support. Dates and photographers are provided when these are known.
If any information can be provided for the origin of photographs that are not acknowledged, we would be grateful for the assistance.
Cover photograph, The Rhodesia Herald , 22 September 1977.
All rights reserved. No part of the publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise – without the express written permission of the publisher. ISBN: 978-1-77922-403-3 (p/b) ISBN: 978-1-77922-404-0 (e-pub) ISBN: 978-1-77922-405-7 (PDF)
Contents
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Preface
1. Introduction
2. What’s in a Name: Tracing my Roots
3. A Dream come True: The Long Road to Africa
4. The Novitiate: A Training Ground for Mission.
5. Exposure to Mission in Practice
6. Follow the Yellow Brick Road: The Way to Kenya
7. Karibuni : A Kenyan Welcome
8. On the Front-Line in War-Torn Rhodesia
9. The Best Retreat: Imprisonment and Deportation
10. A Bittersweet Homecoming
11. In the Belly of the Beast: the Washington Office
12. A Luta Continua: With Refugees in Mozambique
13. The Diplomatic Front: Lancaster House
14. Transition to an Independent Zimbabwe
15. Strengthening Links with Mozambique
16. Opposing Visions of the Church
17. ZIMOFA: Neighbors to Neighbors
18. Going home to a Free Zimbabwe
19. Building a New Zimbabwe
20. A Cold Reception: The Zimbabwe Project
21. New Schools for a New Zimbabwe: ZIMFEP
22. With the People: Tafara Township
23. Disillusion Sets In
24. ‘Knocks on the Door’: Silveira House
25. Losing my Freedom: Congregational leadership
26. You don’t understand: My sister’s sickness and death
27. The Road Less Travelled
Acronyms
AACC
All Africa Conference of Churches (Nairobi)
ACOA
American Committee on Africa
AFCAST
Africa Forum for Catholic Social Teaching
CCJP
Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace
CCR
Centre for Conflict Resolution (Cape Town)
CIDSE
Cooperation Internationale pour le Development et la Solidarité
CIIR
Catholic Institute for International Relations (London)
ESAP
Economic Structural Adjustment Program
FRELIMO
Front for the Liberation of Mozambique
IHM
Immaculate Heart of Mary Sisters
LCBL
Little Children of our Blessed Lady
LCWR
Leadership Conference for Women Religious (USA)
MOGC
Maryknoll Office for Global Concern
NCCK
National Christian Council of Kenya
OCCZIM
Organization of Collective Cooperatives in Zimbabwe
RENAMO
Mozambique National Resistance (Movement)
SND
Sisters of Notre Dame
TAMOFA
Tanzania Mozambique Friendship Association
UNHCR
United Nations High Commission for Refugees
USCMA
United States Catholic Mission Association
WOA
Washington Office on Africa
ZANLA
Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army
ZANU
Zimbabwe African National Union
ZAPU
Zimbabwe African People’s Union
ZIMFEP
Zimbabwe Foundation for Education with Production
ZIMOFA
Zimbabwe Mozambique Friendship Association
ZIPRA
Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army
Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to a number of people who helped these memoirs see the light of day. First, members of my Maryknoll community, too many to mention, who inspired me to take the ‘road less travelled’ and encouraged me when dark moments clouded my enthusiasm. Fay Chung shared so much with me in the camps in Mozambique and through all the years since. All the members of the Justice and Peace Commission in Zimbabwe who stood by me when I was arrested and imprisoned. These include Dieter Scholz, who later became a bishop, Fidelis Mukonori, who later became a priest and Geoff Feltoe. Others are no longer with us; Brother Arthur Dupuis and Mr John Deary. Justice Nick McNally, who died this year (2021) was a pillar of support and wise advice. Kathy Bond Stewart shared with me her passion for non-formal education and has inspired and supported me in many ways. Arkmore Kori, with whom I worked at Silveira House, added some paragraphs about our research work together. I am grateful to Srs Stephanie Conning and Jennifer Halloran helped me to identify photographs in the Maryknoll archive. Joseph Woods and David Harold Barry have generously edited my text and Irene Staunton and Murray McCartney of Weaver Press have seen the memoir through its final stages. To them all and many others not here included I would like to express my sincere thanks.
Janice McLaughlin, MM
Maryknoll, New York
February 2021
Foreword
As the final stages of editing this memoir were reached, news came of Janice’s death on March 7, 2021, at Maryknoll, New York. Despite her increasing weakness over the past six months, she had followed the progress of this editing and had this foreword read to her not long before she died. She was pleased with it. I write this paragraph on the day of her funeral. There have been many tributes, among them from the President of Zimbabwe, Emmerson Mnangagwa, who knew Janice in Mozambique during the war.
***
The word ‘missionary’ is going out of fashion today. We have discovered that we are all missionaries to one another in some sense. Yet, the traditional use of the word still applies, for a little longer, to religiously motivated people who leave their own country to spend their lives in another where they render service in pastoral ministry, teaching in schools or universities or in nursing and medical work. Sr Janice McLaughlin, from the New York based Maryknoll Congregation of Sisters, was a ‘missionary’ in Africa but not in any of these ways.
Missionaries, in the sense of servants of the mission of Jesus to the world, are motivated by faith in him and in God’s plan for humanity but from the 1960s this motivation often expressed itself in a struggle for justice. The Jesuits, for example, explicitly linked proclamation of the faith with the struggle for justice in their 1974 meeting in Rome. From the moment Janice arrived in Tanzania in 1969 this desire to contribute to the promotion of justice was the driving force of her life. Her entry point into this mission was through journalism, both teaching it and practicing it.
Reading her memoir, one is astonished at her courage in becoming engaged in issue after issue without seeming to hesitate. At one point she tells us she might agonize for days over what dress to wear at some function but for life-changing decisions, which were often risky and dangerous, she did not hesitate. By her own admission she was careless about her own safety. She left incriminating evidence lying around when she was in Rhodesia and later expressed horror when she reflected how her diary was read out in court and her negligence implicated others. But it was all an expression of her generous self-giving without ‘counting the cost’.
The intensity and depth of feeling she had for her mission, which is described in these pages, is a measure of the generosity of her commitment to the struggle for freedom and independence for Zimbabwe. This book also shows the variety of initiatives in which Janice was involved and where she was often among the prime movers. For a short while, at the time of her imprisonment and deportation in 1977, she was an international celebrity but she understood the ephemeral nature of this publicity and quickly returned to Africa and entered into the raw life of the refugee camps. Before and after Independence in Zimbabwe (1980) she worked to bring education to the refugees and displaced people both in Mozambique and later in Zimbabwe.
She wrote articles and gave talks on what was happening in the lives of ordinary people as a result of the liberation war and the civil disturbances that followed in both Mozambique and Zimbabwe after independence in both countries. She did a major study, On the Frontline , 1 on the effects of the liberation war on four missions in remote rural areas of Zimbabwe.
Her desire to be ‘with the people’ was not a romantic armchair wish; she actually lived in a small house with another Maryknoll sister in Tafara, a ‘high density’ low-income suburb of Harare, for four years before being recalled to New York to work in the media and later to be President, that is, over all responsible, for the worldwide Maryknoll community. Her heart was always in Africa and at the end of her term she returned to work as a facilitator and animator in training courses for advocacy and peace building in Zimbabwe. Among the many causes she took up in these later