Reflections on my friendship with Bishop Mwamba

I first met the Rt Rev Dr Trevor Musonda Mwamba in 2006 in Gaborone, when he was the Anglican Bishop of Botswana and of the Church of the Province of Central Africa – Zambia, Malawi, Zimbabwe, and Botswana. My book Colour Bar – about Sir Seretse Khama, the founding President of Botswana – had just been published and a meeting was held to ‘launch’ it on its way. One of the guests was Bishop Mwamba, who has a close connection to the story: he was a personal friend of Lady Ruth Khama and he is married to Mmasekgoa Masire-Mwamba, the daughter of Sir Quett Masire, Botswana’s second president. The Bishop greeted me with a wide smile and handed me a written prayer with blessings for the journey of the book. It was a wonderful and strengthening moment. Since then, the Bishop has followed that journey and he was delighted when the book was made into the film A United Kingdom. He joined me at public events in London to answer questions about the story in the film and the audience responded with keen interest and warmth. I have met few people as modest as the Bishop. He has degrees in law and theology from the Universities of Zambia and of Oxford, as well as a PhD from Yale University – but he rarely mentions these intellectual achievements and I have seen him to be untouched by personal ambition. Rather, he is driven by a strong sense of duty and a wish to serve others, regardless of their social or financial status. For him, we are all equal in the eyes of God. Leaving Botswana in 2012, he took up the position of Vicar of St Margaret’s Church in Barking, an economically deprived parish of London. Attending a service there, I saw how much he was loved by his congregation. The Bishop describes a strong sense of connection with the vision and determination that inspired the struggle of Zambians against colonial rule, led by Kenneth Kaunda. He celebrated the memory of the freedom struggle at a conference organised in 2018 by some of us at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at the University of London and by the United Nations Association, Westminster Branch, to mark the 60th anniversary of the All African People’s Conference in Accra in 1958. The spirit behind the 1958 Accra conference, explained the Bishop, was the philosophy of ‘Ubuntu’, so that independent nations were morally compelled to help liberate other countries from colonial rule. The Bishop reminded the audience of President Kwame Nkrumah’s speech at Ghana’s independence in 1957: ‘Our independence is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of Africa.’ Former President Kaunda, who is now so sadly missed, had attended the 1958 conference. He kindly recorded a special message for us in London in 2018: holding up a cherished photograph of Nkrumah, Dr Kaunda recalled that at last ‘we could see Africa as one. We left Accra very inspired and refreshed’. ​Another matter on which Bishop Mwamba and I have worked closely together, along with many others worldwide, is the effort to establish the truth about the aircraft crash in 1961 that killed UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld near Ndola in Zambia, when it was British-ruled Northern Rhodesia. Hammarskjöld was from Sweden. But when he died on Zambian soil, explains the Bishop, ‘his soul became a part of Zambia and Zambia a part of him. As Zambians we are therefore desirous to know the truth of why Dag Hammarskjöld was killed.’ With Hammarskjöld’s death, maintains the Bishop, ‘the world lost one of its greatest servants – a brilliant mind, a brave and compassionate spirit, a peacemaker, a mystic. He pointed us to strive diligently for a world in which people solve their problems by peaceful means and not by force.’ There is compelling evidence to show that the original inquiries into Hammarskjöld’s death, both Rhodesian and UN, were flawed, and that the key testimonies of Zambian witnesses were dismissed, disqualified and rejected. The Bishop has described this as a matter of great concern, in terms of both its international ramifications and the history of Zambia. It also has a personal dimension: twenty four years after the crash in 1961, the Bishop was ordained a priest in Ndola; and not far from Ndola, in the beautiful town of Luanshya, he served as a parish priest. In 2015 the UN renewed its inquiry into Hammarskjöld’s death. Bishop Mwamba thereupon took a leading role in an event at the British Parliament, where he called on the British and South African governments to cooperate with the UN and to provide necessary historical documents. His message was moving and profound: ‘Ultimately the truth does set a person free and a country too - ennobling both, making them better, to do good in the world.’ The world is a troubled place today, not least because of the pandemic and global injustice. It is in need of people like Bishop Mwamba, whose wisdom and moral compass show us the best way forward. *Dr Susan Williams, Senior Research Fellow Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, UK