CAPE TOWN (SOUTH AFRICA)
IOL
March 11, 2018
By Bulelwa Payi
The Archbishop of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa has apologised for its past wrongs and failure to address sexual abuse claims.
Archbishop Thabo Makgoba was responding to damning allegations of sexual assault of a former Anglican and award-winning South African author Ishtiyaq Shukri by priests at St Cyprian’s School in Kimberley, Northern Cape.
Shukri’s best known work, The Silent Minaret, is about a South African Muslim boy facing prejudice in London in the wake of 9/11, which won the EU Literary Award in 2004.
“As the Archbishop of southern Africa, I take responsibility for what has happened during the time of my predecessors and where we have wronged or failed anyone, we beg their forgiveness,” Makgoba said.
He said the church’s Synod of Bishops in southern Africa was “shocked and distressed” to hear of Shukri’s abuse. He expressed his commitment to focus on claims of abuse levelled against the church’s leaders who were entrusted to give pastoral care, especially when nothing had been done about such allegations.
Makgoba said Shukri had been in touch with one of the bishops but was “unwilling to go into detail or name the person or persons who had abused him”.
“While respecting his wishes, we usually urge victims of abuse to lay charges with the police and with church authorities. The police are often better equipped to investigate cases than we are, especially in cases which go back many decades and may have occurred in dioceses whose former leaders have died,” Makgoba added.
Shukri broke his more than 40-year silence in an open letter to the press on sexual assaults he allegedly endured from various priests at St Cyprian’s Grammar School.
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