ZIMBABWE
The Standard
Sunday, 15 July 2012
Spending most of our teenage years at a Catholic secondary school, we never really believed that priests and nuns were celibate. It was impossible for us adolescent African boys, born and bred in rural areas, where we received our sex education as soon as we realised we were boys and not girls, to agree to the lie that a real man could live without a woman for all his life.
Our highly patriarchal sex education inculcated into us that boys should have girlfriends, marry them at the appropriate time and have children. The real man loved women and had several at his beck and call. It was, with the benefit of hindsight, the wrong kind of education, hence the now entrenched “small house” phenomenon. It seems our priests also went through the same education.
At the mission school we always paired certain priests with certain nuns and alleged that they had sex romps once in a while. The more imaginative boys described in sordid detail how they had “seen with their own eyes” Father So-n-so doing it “live” with Sister So-n-so. The situation was not helped by open friendships exhibited by some priests and nuns.
We were innocent little boys who admired these priests for the education they gave us, both in the classroom and on the sport field; like us, they loved macho sport. If abuse of boys was present we didn’t see it perhaps because we were too innocent to even think that homosexuality existed. Looking back, and putting one and one together, some incidents come up that may suggest there were “special” relationships between some boys and some priests.
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