Almost four years later, his more senior cleric, a smiling Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams, is in Zimbabwe's capital city shaking hands with the dictator, after handing him a dossier on abuses inflicted on Anglicans in Zimbabwe. Just down the road from the Mugabe-Williams photo shoot, the perpetrator of those very same abuses, self-styled Archbishop Nolbert Kunonga, convened a press conference at the Anglican Cathedral at which he said: “Williams coming will not make the CPCA (Church Province of Central Africa) get in the church buildings. Look, we are here in the Cathedral and they are meeting at the Sports Centre. I am the owner of this (ndini muridzi wazvo). Gandiya is showing off with a white man and I do not care. This is not the end of Kunonga,” he boasted.
By calling Williams a civil servant representing neo-colonialism and suggesting he comes to "lobby for homosexuality" Kunonga knows he holds the high ground. Kunonga is in total control of all the church’s assets and funds. He has openly declared his support for Robert Mugabe and has been given a farm as reward.
Really, Dr Williams, do you seriously believe that such diplomatic niceties will make a scrap of difference? – MIKE ROOK, ¬by e-mail