ZIM TEEN’S SUSPICIOUS DEATH IN A POOL, BOYS FORCED TO SWIM, SHOWER AND PRAY NAKED IN ANGLICAN CHURCH MESS

THE tragic death of a Zimbabwean teenager, who drowned in a swimming pool in December 1992, triggered the tsunami, which led to the resignation of the leader of the Anglican church for the first time in the church’s history.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, the spiritual leader of the global Anglican family, resigned this week after it emerged he covered up the violent abuse of scores of boys and young men.

The review into the Anglican church’s handling of John Smyth’s abuses led to Welby’s resignation.

Smyth was a Canadian-born British barrister and serial child abuser who was actively involved in the Christian Ministry for children within the Anglican Church.

He was chairman of the Iwerne Trust which raised funds and ran the conservative evangelical Iwerne camps.

Smyth might have been brought to justice had Welby formally reported him to the police in 2013.

Smyth moved to Zimbabwe with his wife, Anne, in 1984 – exactly 40 years ago – after Church of England figures discovered his abuse of boys and young men at summer camps for Christians, including beating them and forcing them to strip naked.

By 1986, Smyth was running Christian holiday camps for boys in Zimbabwe.

He would beat the boys with table tennis bats and force them to shower, swim and pray naked with him, according to the independent Keith Makin review.

Smyth abused as many as 130 boys and young men in the UK, Zimbabwe and South Africa.

In December 1992, 16-year-old Nyachuru drowned in a swimming pool in what the review said were “suspicious circumstances”.

Smyth officiated at Nyachuru’s funeral, whose death he later described as an “unfortunate incident”.

Smyth was charged in Zimbabwe in 1995 with culpable homicide and assaulting the young boys.

The trial started in 1997, but collapsed because of the prosecutor having a conflict of interest.

In 2001, Smyth and his wife moved to Durban, South Africa, after they were barred from entering Zimbabwe.

By 2005, he had moved to Cape Town and was campaigning for conservative evangelical causes.

That year, he advised on an unsuccessful legal case against South Africa’s new same-sex marriage law.

Instead, Smyth died in South Africa in 2018, while a UK police investigation prompted by a Channel 4 documentary in 2017 was still continuing.

It was not until February 2017, after Channel 4 broadcast allegations of abuse against Smyth, that his Cape Town church, Church-on-Main, removed him and Ann Smyth as leaders.

The church said at the time that it had been made aware of “worrying concerns” about Smyth the previous September. It said Smyth had met young men for games of squash, “followed by a shower in a common shower, then lunch over which we were told (Smyth) would make generally unsolicited inquiries about the young men’s experience of pornography, masturbation and other sexual matters”.

Smyth was “offering his advice regarding sexual matters that left the person feeling uncomfortable”, the church said, describing it as “pastorally unwise”.

The church emphasised then that it had no evidence of crimes or of physical contact between Smyth and the young men.

In 2013, Stephen Conway, then bishop of Ely, sent a letter to the bishop of Cape Town setting out an allegation made by one of Smyth’s UK victims.

“It would appear that no information about the risk he poses to children and adults has followed him from the United Kingdom to Zimbabwe or South Africa,” Conway said in the letter, published by the independent review.

The then bishop, Garth Counsell, “is in consultation with the rector of that parish and will consult with the archbishop of Cape Town … Thabo Makgoba, as to the way forward”, a brief reply published by the review said.

In 2021, Welby wrote to Makgoba offering to support a review of what Smyth had done in southern Africa.

Two years later, the bishop of Stepney, Joanne Grenfell, who leads safeguarding in the Church of England, said at the synod that after the review they would “liaise” with those investigating Smyth’s abuses in Zimbabwe and South Africa. – H-Metro Reporter/Guardian