ELLIOT TAFARA MASHINGAIDZE

Methodist minister and university chaplain who fed three hundred mourners in a hungry year

Mufundisi Elliot Mashingaidze never owned a car that started on the first try. For thirty years he drove an increasingly rebellious Peugeot 504 to hospital bedsides across Harare, pushed it uphill with the help of strangers he afterwards invited to church, and insisted that this was how he had met most of his congregation.

Born in Marondera in 1945, Elliot attended Waddilove Institution, the Methodist mission school, and trained as a teacher. He taught geography at Churchill Boys' High School from 1966 to 1973 before answering a call to ministry. He studied at Epworth Theological College, was ordained in 1976 and served congregations in Mbare, Highfield and Mufakose through the difficult years of the liberation war and the early decades of independence.

In 1990 he became chaplain at the University of Zimbabwe, a post he held for fifteen years. He counselled students through exams, heartbreak and hunger, kept a pot of sadza on a hotplate in his office, and quietly paid the fees of those who would otherwise have been sent home. He later earned a degree himself at the same university, graduating at the age of forty-three alongside students young enough to be his children, and sat on the board of Africa University.

He married Chipo Mutasa in 1970. He loved sadza with beef stew, mazhanje in season, Dynamos football on the radio and the hymns of Charles Wesley, which he sang loudly and slightly flat. In the cash-starved December of 2019, he died at home in Avondale after a short illness, and the church fed three hundred mourners from donated pots and bags of maize meal.

He leaves his wife, three children and eleven grandchildren.

“The Gospel is not a sermon. It is a pot of sadza shared with whoever is hungry.”