Janice Mclaughlin, nun who exposed abuse of Black Africans, dies at 79
Sister Janice Mclaughlin, an American nun who was imprisoned by the white-minority government in war-torn Rhodesia for exposing atrocities against its Black citizens, then returned to help the new country of Zimbabwe establish an educational system, died March 7 in the motherhouse of the Maryknoll Sisters of St. Dominic, near Ossining, New York. She was 79.
Her religious order, of which she was president for a time, announced her death. It did not provide a cause.
Mclaughlin spent nearly 40 years ministering in Africa. She lived much of that time in Zimbabwe, starting in 1977, when the country was still known as Rhodesia.
She arrived in the midst of a seven-year struggle by Black nationalists to overthrow the white-minority, apartheid-style regime headed by Prime Minister Ian Smith, a fierce opponent of Black-majority rule.
As the press secretary for the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace, a group of laymen and clergy that opposed the government, Mclaughlin helped expose human-rights abuses across the country. These included the systematic torture of Black people in rural areas and the shooting of innocent civilians, including clergy. She also wrote about the forced resettlement of nearly 600,000 Black citizens, who had been held in heavily guarded camps in overcrowded conditions lacking proper sanitation and food.
Just three months after her arrival, she was charged with being a terrorist sympathizer and was locked in solitary confinement for 18 days. She faced a penalty of seven years in prison, but the United States interceded, and she was instead deported.
Her writings had been published in obscure journals, but her imprisonment drew widespread attention; the Vatican, the United Nations and the State Department spoke out on her behalf. On the day she was thrown out of the country and walked across the tarmac to the plane that would take her out of Rhodesia, a group of about 50 Black and white Rhodesians, many of them priests and nuns,