It was April 18, 1980 when in Harare, which was then still known as Salisbury, the birth of a sovereign state in Africa was celebrated: Zimbabwe which, until then, had been a colony of the United Kingdom called Southern Rhodesia. and in which there was a segregationist regime similar to that of apartheid in South Africa.
To celebrate the liberation from British colonial rule, that night, Bob Marley and the Wailers, the historic reggae music group, held a historic concert in front of over one hundred thousand people who, in the notes and words of the upbeat king of music, listened to a a futuristic message, an epiphany of rebirth, a blessing for a different, new and prosperous tomorrow for their country.
The words, however, remained only words, the songs in the space of a few years broke against the anthemural of reality, and the chanted melodies that promised land and work, equality and unity, were followed by terrible years.
Zimbabwe became the kingdom of Robert Mugabe who ruled for four decades first as premier, and then as president, in an authoritarian and repressive way. The country experienced in a very short time an unparalleled economic crisis with inflation that exceeded 1281%, civil liberties were suppressed and the land known to be bathed by the Zambezi River and host the Victoria Falls also had to cope with the 1990s. the unstoppable spread of AIDS. Although Mugabe died in 2019, the dramas continue to haunt the southern African state today.
Emmerson Mnangagwa, current president and dolphin of the former autocrat, is in fact continuing to govern the nation in an authoritarian way, the economy is completely destroyed, 8 million people, out of a population of 12 million, live in a state of food insecurity and in last hours there is also an increase in deaths from Covid-19. But in addition to the obvious and macroscopic problems there are also others, more hidden and silent, but equally dramatic that afflict the country and the latest episode in Zimbabwe that shocked the world, is the death by childbirth of a girl of only 14. years part of the sect of the Apostolic Church of John Marange.
Memory Machaya was a member of the sect of the Apostolic Church of John Marange, and on July 15 she died in a temple after giving birth to her son. The religious sect of Marange shuns and bans modern medicine, instead promotes polygamy and marriages with child brides and the teenager died precisely because she was forbidden to have hospital assistance during childbirth. The girl, who last year had been forced to abandon her studies to marry an adult man, gave birth assisted by five adepts who were unable to give her any kind of help during labor. Furthermore, only two hours after the death of the young woman, the leaders of the spiritual congregation decided to proceed in great secrecy with the burial of Memory, preventing the family from attending the funeral rite.
It was the indignation of relatives that brought out what happened in early August. The parents have in fact reported everything to the local press and through social networks the news of the tragedy has become of global interest, mobilizing thousands of activists around the world. Even the United Nations expressed itself on the dramatic story, making it known in a statement that: “to take note with deep concern and strongly condemn the circumstances that led to the death of Memory Machaya”, and then went on to say that the episode reveals a terrible problem in Zimbabwe, that of marriages with minors and sexual violence against child brides and furthermore, reading the note issued by the United Nations office in Zimbabwe, we read that one in three girls in the African country gets married before the age of 18.
The tragic event thus brought out two little-known problems of the African nation. The first is legislative, meaning that no law in Zimbabwe provides a minimum age for consent to marriage. And the second problem is instead that of religious sects which, with false promises, illusions of well-being and wealth, and relying on the desperation and misery of the population, promote cultural rituals and phenomena which, however, turn out to be real social wounds. And one of the largest and most widespread independent churches in the country is that of Johan Marange, the sect to which Memory Machaya belonged.
The founding of the John Marange Apostolic Church in Zimbabwe can be traced back to the 1930s. Johanne Marange, the founder, was born in 1912 and died in 1963. Growing up in the Methodist Church, in 1932 he said he had a divine revelation and was called to be the apostle of Christ and received the power to perform miracles. healings and to conduct exorcisms. The sect, initially, spread only in the restricted circle of John Marange’s family, but then, by virtue of the anti-colonial preaching and a self-styled royal origin of the preacher, the doctrine began to spread and find more and more followers so that today it counts over 3 million followers worldwide.
The members of the brotherhood believe that Johanne Marange received the statute of the church directly from the Holy Spirit and among the dogmas of the Zimbabwean pastor’s doctrine is that of practicing polygamy and refusing medicine.
Johanne Marange, as the founder of this spiritual movement, had thirteen wives and his church still legitimizes polygamy by drawing its arguments from ancestral African cultural traditions and the biblical examples of Abraham’s Israelite ancestors. Furthermore, women do not enjoy the same rights as men but live in a subordinate position with respect to the male members of the church and among other things the community encourages women to marry still unlikely in order to obtain the role of head-wives at the within the family nucleus. A dogma which consequently had two dramatic consequences: the increase in the marriages of still younger girls and the abandonment of school by these.
Another teaching of the “priests” “of the Church of Marange, with dramatic social repercussions, is the rejection of secular medicine. The sect preaches the theory that diseases are only of a spiritual nature and that only the interventions of the “prophets” can lead to the healing of the sick. Furthermore, death from illness is nothing more than the expression of God’s will and modern medical treatments must be strongly prohibited and rejected because they exalt human beings above the Creator and then because resorting to medicine is a demonstration of the absence of faith in the Most High.
Over the years, there have been many cases of deaths among members of the covenant, including children, in the church of Marange, which could easily be saved with hospitalization or the use of drugs. During the spread of AIDS, in the 90s, the sect has always denied the existence of the HIV virus, portraying it as a punishment from God for sins and sins and today we are witnessing a similar attitude regarding the coronavirus so much so that in mid-July, in a temple in Bocha, an important ceremony was held that brought together thousands of followers without any respect for anti-covid regulations.
After Memory Machaya’s death, the authorities of the Harare government have made it known that they are looking for the culprits to bring them to justice, but the question that remains is whether arrests will be enough to avert other similar tragedies. And perhaps to answer this question it is enough to read what was written by the director of Human Rights Watch South Africa Dewa Mavhinga, who first made it known that a few days after the girl’s death, the leaders of the Apostolic Church of John Marange offered a child bride of only 9 years to Memory Machaya’s husband, as compensation for the loss of his young wife.