The evangelical Christian barrister John Smyth abused as many 130 boys and young men in the UK, Zimbabwe and possibly other African countries but an independent review has said there remains little concrete information on his time in South Africa.
The review into the Anglican church’s handling of Smyth’s abuses said he might have been brought to justice had Justin Welby, who on Tuesday announced he would step down as archbishop of Canterbury, formally reported him to the police when he found out in 2013.
Instead, Smyth died in South Africa in 2018, while a UK police investigation prompted by a Channel 4 documentary in 2017 was still continuing.
He had moved to Zimbabwe with his wife, Anne, in 1984 after Church of England figures discovered his abuse of boys and young men at summer camps for Christians, including beating them and forcing them to strip naked, but did not report him to police.
By 1986, Smyth was running Christian holiday camps for boys in Zimbabwe. He would beat boys with table tennis bats and force them to shower, swim and pray naked with him, according to the independent Makin review.
In December 1992, 16-year-old Guide Nyachuru drowned in a swimming pool in what the review said were “suspicious circumstances”. Smyth officiated at Nyachuru’s funeral, whose death he later described as an “unfortunate incident”.
Smyth was charged in Zimbabwe in 1995 with culpable homicide and assaulting other boys. The trial started in 1997, but collapsed because of the prosecutor having a conflict of interest.
In 2001, Smyth and his wife moved to Durban, South Africa, after they were barred from re-entering Zimbabwe. By 2005, he had moved to Cape Town and was campaigning for conservative evangelical causes. That year, he advised on an unsuccessful legal case against South Africa’s new same-sex marriage law.
“There is little concrete information on John Smyth’s time in South Africa. It is highly likely that he was continuing to abuse young men and there is some evidence to this effect,” the Makin review said. “How John Smyth funded his quite opulent lifestyle, living in a large house in a quiet suburb of Cape Town, is not known.”
It was not until February 2017, after Channel 4 broadcast allegations of abuse against Smyth, that his Cape Town church, Church-on-Main, removed him and Ann Smyth as leaders.
The church said at the time that it had been made aware of “worrying concerns” about Smyth the previous September. It said Smyth had met young men for games of squash, “followed by a shower in a common shower, then lunch over which we were told [Smyth] would make generally unsolicited inquiries about the young men’s experience of pornography, masturbation and other sexual matters”.
Smyth was “offering his advice regarding sexual matters that left the person feeling uncomfortable”, the church said, describing it as “pastorally unwise”.
The church emphasised then that it had no evidence of crimes or of physical contact between Smyth and the young men. It also said that it only became aware of the extent of the alleged UK abuse in January 2017.
In 2013, Stephen Conway, then bishop of Ely and now of Lincoln, sent a letter to the bishop of Cape Town setting out an allegation made by one of Smyth’s UK victims.
“It would appear that no information about the risk he poses to children and adults has followed him from the United Kingdom to Zimbabwe or South Africa,” Conway said in the letter, published by the independent review.
The then bishop, Garth Counsell, “is in consultation with the rector of that parish and will consult with the archbishop of Cape Town … Thabo Makgoba, as to the way forward”, a brief reply published by the review said.
In 2021, Welby wrote to Makgoba offering to support a review of what Smyth had done in southern Africa.
Two years later, the bishop of Stepney, Joanne Grenfell, who leads safeguarding in the Church of England, said at the synod that after the review they would “liaise” with those investigating Smyth’s abuses in Zimbabwe and South Africa.
