Catholic and Protestant church groups in Zimbabwe have voiced deep alarm about the Mugabe government's organized violence against those perceived to have voted against it, and its refusal to release the results of the March 29 elections. Despite the economic and social disaster Mugabe's government has brought on Zimbabwe in recent years, the government has, as one news article put it recently, maintained "support among neighboring countries where many still hold him in awe as an African liberation hero" of Zimbabwe's 1980 overturning of white-minority rule.

As Zimbabwean theologian Dr. David Kaulemu described at last month's Ecumenical Advocacy Days, many African countries are struggling not just with the ghosts of colonialism, but also with the ghosts of the liberation movement-- the fact that the concepts and leadership style that helped win independence can hinder the development of democracy. We spoke with Kaulemu after his presentation.

Sojourners: It seems, especially in the situation in Zimbabwe, that the ghost of the liberation movement is a very real and very current issue.

Kaulemu: That's a real challenge—appreciating the values, the vision of the liberation struggle, but also appreciating the limitations. Our liberation movements, the way in which they developed their skills, their personnel, their visions, and also their institutions, failed to turn them into institutions for governance and for real freedom for everyone in the country.

And so the challenge here is in reconstructing, both in terms of our vision and also in terms of our institutions, and also our personnel, our skills—reconstructing in such a way that we speak a different language where we are really concerned about the poverty in the country, we're really concerned about the dignity of human beings—each and every human being—it doesn't matter which tribe, which ethnic group, which race. And so to really begin to talk about new citizenship in a free Zimbabwe.

Do you see ways in which the faith community is helping to take the next step toward that reconstruction you're describing?

The faith communities are making a contribution. They have begun to raise certain issues, certain questions, which will help to move us forward.

These same institutions have challenges .… For a lot of church leaders, they in a sense forgot about their gospel and took the gospel of the liberation struggle. And for those whose imagination continues to be determined by the liberation struggle, you can see them using the church for the purposes of those political goals.

But we are beginning to see leaders who are now saying, we have our own values as Christians or as faith communities, which made us support the liberation struggle. Not that the liberation struggle molded our values, but that we agreed with some of the basic tenets of the liberation struggle—but from the point of view of faith communities. And that disjunction, that distinction, is beginning to be clarified more and more.

Dr. David Kaulemu is the regional coordinator for Eastern and Southern Africa at the African Forum on Catholic Social Teachings in Harare, Zimbabwe. He is also a visiting fellow at Georgetown University's Woodstock Theological Center. He spoke with Sojourners assistant editor Elizabeth Palmberg at last month's Ecumenical Advocacy Days in Washington, D.C.