Bernard Mizeki

Bernard Mizeki (sometimes spelt Bernard Mzeki; c. 1861 – 18 June 1896) was an African Christian missionary and martyr.

Early life

He was born Mamiyeri Mitseka Gwambe in Inhambane, Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique) and raised in a traditional fashion. As a boy, he did some work in a store run by a Portuguese trader, and learned some Portuguese. Between the ages of ten and fifteen, he moved with a cousin to Cape Town, Cape Colony (South Africa), where he took a new name, "Barns", as well as various jobs as a laborer and house servant.

Missionary Work

Through the work of the Cowley Fathers' mission, and particularly the night school run by German missionary Baroness Paula Dorothea von Blomberg, he became a Christian. He and five others were and some of the first converts, baptized in St Philip's Mission, Sir Lowry Road, on 7 March 1886. Shortly thereafter, Bernard (then about 25 years old) started work at St Columba's Hostel, which was run by the missionaries for African men. Within a few months he was sent to Zonnebloem College to train as a catechist.

In January 1891, Bernard accompanied the new missionary bishop of Mashonaland, George Wyndham Knight-Bruce, as a lay catechist and medical worker among the Shona people in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). He was sent to work in the Marandellas (Marondera) district among the Nhowe people, and settled in the kraal of Mangwende Mungati. Bernard built his home there, and gained a reputation as a teacher. He also took children who wanted to learn into his home to teach them the gospel, as well as traveled around the countryside, and to the bishop's residence in Umtali to help with translations. Although he sometimes served as an official translator, and could have earned considerable pay in Umtali, Mizeki preferred to work in Theydon.

In March 1896, Mizeki married Mutwa (later ‘Lily’), an orphaned granddaughter of the Mangwende and a Christian convert. African Anglican priest Rev. Hezekiah Mtobi, recently arrived from Grahamstown, South Africa led the ceremony. Mizeki was thus admitted into the Mangwende's kinship network, which some resented. Also, he campaigned against drunkenness, and tribal practices including the killing of twin babies and the harsh treatment (including killing) of individuals accused of sorcery.

With the Mangwende's permission, Mizeki moved his growing community (several families, as well as young boys he was entrusted to teach), about two miles. They resettled across the river in a fertile area with a spring, but also near a sacred grove which was believed to be inhabited by spirits of the tribe's ancestral lions. Rather than make offerings to such spirits, Mizeki made the sign of the cross in the air, and carved crosses on some of the trees, and later felled some trees while preparing a field to plant wheat.

Martyrdom

The Ndebele people (traditional rivalries of the Shona) had rebelled against the British South Africa Company, and in March, 1896 the Matabeleland Rebellion spread into the Shona country. Southern Africa had been experiencing drought and locust plagues, which led to famine. Resentment against the British and their taxes and mandatory inoculations simmered, inflamed by orders to kill and burn infected cattle. Although missionary workers were being ordered to safety, Mizeki refused to leave, rationalizing that his absent bishop’s orders to stay could not be overruled (although the bishop was in England receiving medical treatment for malaria, and would soon die there), and that he had recently extended hospitality to an incapacitated elderly man.

On the night of 18 June 1896, Mizeki was dragged from his home and stabbed. Mutwa found him still alive and went for help. She and others reported seeing a great white light all over that place, and a loud noise “like many wings of great birds”. Bernard's body had disappeared by their return. Mchemwa, a son of the Mangwende and an ally of the witch doctors, was later found responsible for Bernard's murder and the removal of his body, as well as the destruction of the mission settlement there.

Legacy

Bernard Mizeki’s work among the Shona bore fruit, beyond the posthumous daughter Mutwa bore. After long years of mission work in Mashonaland, the first Shona convert to be baptised was one of the young men whom Bernard had taught: John Kapuya. John was baptised only a month after Bernard’s death, on 18 July 1896. In 1899 a white Anglican priest returned to the area, and reestablished the mission, as well as a school. Today, Bernard Mizeki College stands close to where he lived, and the Mangwende's kraal, above the village, is crowned with a large cross to commemorate Mizeki.

In the 1930s, a chapel was built on the site of Mizeki's martyrdom, and consecrated in a great ceremony in June 1938. On the fiftieth anniversary of his death in 1946, an even larger celebration was held, attended by Mutwa and their daughter, and included a proclamation issued by Rhodesia's governor.

The Cowley fathers promoted his cult, which spread throughout Southern Africa. Although as the African independence movement grew, some considered him a collaborationist, others appreciated his identification of the Shona's ancestral deity Mwari as the Christian God and portrayed Mizeki as embodying African aspirations as well as a hero of the faith. Anglican leaders founded a Bernard Mizeki guild in 1973, to help migrant workers. After Zimbabwe's independence in 1980, pilgrimages to Mizeki's grave became popular, even huge processions and consistent with the Shona tradition of travel to sacred places.

Veneration

Mizeki is honoured with a feast day on the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church (USA) on June 18. His martyrdom is a commemoration in the Common Worship of the Church of England, and in An Anglican Prayer Book (1989) of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa.

External links

• Mashonaland Martyr, by Mike Oettle at the Wayback Machine (archived October 27, 2009)