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Janice McLaughlin (13 February 1942 - 7 March 2021) was an American Catholic missionary and human rights activist who was imprisoned in Rhodesia in the 1970s for exposing human rights violations by the white minority government.
Biography[]
McLaughlin was born in Pennsylvania in 1942. She graduated high school in the 1960s and joined the Maryknoll Sisters of St. Dominic, the United States' first congregation of nuns dedicated to overseas Christian missions. She spent most of her forty-year career as a missionary in Africa.
In 1977, McLaughlin arrived in Rhodesia, an unrecognized Apartheid state ruled by the white minority government of Ian Smith. At the time Rhodesia was enveloped in the Rhodesian Bush War, where black nationalists fought to overthrow the minority government with the support of other African states. McLaughlin worked as press secretary for the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe, a Catholic NGO which opposed the white minority government, and was in charge of drafting newspaper reports, radio and television broadcasts and public statements. In this capacity she exposed systematic atrocities and repression of the black population by the government, including the widespread torture of alleged militants, the forced resettlement of around 600, 000 black Rhodesians who were held in overcrowded concentration camps with poor sanitation and little food, the murders of innocent civilians under the guise of anti-terrorism operations and the assassination of Catholic clergy who opposed the government.
Three months after her arrival in Rhodesia, McLaughlin was arrested on charges of being a terrorist sympathizer and a Marxist. She was imprisoned in solitary confinement for eighteen days and threatened with a seven-year prison sentence, but was released after pressure from the United States, the United Nations and the Vatican. However, she was deported back to the United States. She was met at the airport by 50 black and white Rhodesians, many of them Catholics, who cheered and sang the nationalist anthem Ishe Komborera Africa.
After her deportation, McLaughlin worked with the Zimbabwe Project, a Catholic initiative which worked to assist refugees fleeing the war in Rhodesia. She returned to Africa in 1979 to help Rhodesian refugees to get settled in Mozambique. The following year, the white minority government in Rhodesia collapsed and ceded control to the black majority and McLaughlin was invited to Rhodesia, now renamed Zimbabwe, by Prime Minister Robert Mugabe to help rebuild the nation's education system. In addition to education reform, she also established nine schools for war veterans and former refugees. She later criticized the Mugabe government for its political repression and atrocities, openly supporting the revolution that deposed Mugabe in 2017.
McLaughlin returned to New York in 1991, before returning to Zimbabwe yet again in 1997 to train staff working at Silveira House, a missionary-run education centre for the poor. In her later life she worked in efforts to campaign against human trafficking in Zimbabwe. She died in March 2021 and donated her body to medical research in her will.