Zimbabwe Lepers Remember Protector

Sitting on a carpet of jacaranda blossom, under a broad avenue of spreading trees in purple bloom, Thomas waves a bandaged arm stump across the Mutemwa leper colony to point out his home.

Behind him, atop a steep granite mountain, is a tiny cross on the skyline, a memorial to the man whose legacy this is, a murder victim who some say should become Zimbabwe’s first saint.

Brother John Bradburne of the Roman Catholic Franciscan order transformed Mutemwa in the 1970s from a barbaric isolation camp of sack-clad lepers, identified by numbers hanging round their necks, into a calm oasis of clean and effective medical care.

In the words of Father John Dove, who took over the center after Bradburne was slain in 1979, the Franciscan brother was “the eyes of the blind, the hands of the fingerless and the feet of those who could not walk.”

His name has since been surrounded by legends and talk of miracles. Some of his Catholic brethren have asked for the former British army officer from Cumbria in northern England to be canonized.

The cross on Chitoma Mountain was put up by an Englishman who recovered his sight after praying for Bradburne to intercede for him with God when he found he was going blind.

“People around here still revere Bradburne,” Mary Hardwick, who helps run the center, told Reuters. “There was a memorial service for him last year and so many people came to pay their respects that a whole crowd had to stand outside the church.”

Bradburne carried on treating Thomas and his fellow patients after Mutemwa’s governing committee fired him in 1973, after four years, for refusing to hang numbers around the lepers’ necks.

The heavily-bearded Englishman moved to a tin hut on the mountainside overlooking Mutemwa but every night until his death he slipped down the hill to dress his patients’ wounds by firelight, Hardwick said.

Respected by the lepers but unpopular with local people, Bradburne died at the height of a bush war for independence in what was then the British colony of Rhodesia.

Denounced to black guerrillas fighting in the bush as an informer because he kept a radio in his tin hut, he was marched off for a summary trial in September, 1979, released by the guerrilla leader but shot on his way home.

Thomas has been around the longest of the 60 patients who live at this trim village of terra-cotta houses around a smart modern clinic, which was funded by the Zimbabwe government and by Catholic donations from abroad.

“When I first came for treatment, it was 1939 and this place was still being built,” he said. “They treated me across the valley and discharged me, but I had to come back again later to this new place when it (the leprosy) got worse.”

Hardwick said Thomas was so fiercely independent that he came to the clinic only to have sores treated. With no hands or feet, he still manages to farm a vegetable plot and tend his chickens and doves.

Nowadays, patients at the center are given a weekly package of groceries and about $2 a month for spending money. If they work around the clinic, they can earn up to $15 a month.

Those who want to can farm plots of land beside the center, not far from the Catholic, Anglican and Methodist churches that serve the little community.

Former patients who want to be resettled away from Mutemwa have land found for them by the Ministry of Lands, Agriculture and Rural Resettlement. Mutemwa provides them with plows, tools, seeds and chickens to start a new life.

Most of the patients at Mutemwa are “burned-out cases” who no longer have active leprosy but need frequent nursing when their numbed limbs become infected. About a quarter of them are from neighboring Zambia, Mozambique or Malawi.

Only five are still being treated for leprosy, with a cocktail of drugs which must be taken for a year. Since the use of Dapsone, the main anti-leprosy drug, began on a large scale in Zimbabwe, the disease has been almost wiped out.