Donal Lamont
Donal Raymond Lamont (27 July 1911 – 14 August 2003), was an Irish-Rhodesian Roman Catholic bishop and missionary who was best known for his fight against white minority rule in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Early years Donal Raymond Lamont was born on 27 July 1911 at Ballycastle, County Antrim, in Ulster, the northern province in Ireland. He was a pupil at the Carmelite school Terenure College, in Dublin. In 1929 he entered the Carmelite Order, doing his novitiate in Kinsale, County Cork. After studies at University College Dublin, he studied theology at St Albert's College, Rome and was ordained as a priest in Rome during July 1937. On returning to Ireland, he taught English literature at Terenure. In 1946, he volunteered to go to the new Carmelite mission in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and went with two companions to Umtali (now known as Mutare), in the east of the country, and close to the border with Mozambique. In August 1953, Southern Rhodesia joined with Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland to form the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, a form of 'federal colony' within the British Empire. In 1957, Umtali was given the status of a diocese, and Lamont appointed its first bishop. Purchased People In 1959, Bishop Lamont wrote his first pastoral letter as a bishop, entitled Purchased People. This dealt with matters relating to racial prejudice and segregation, and was highly critical of the policies of the Government of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. The letter contained a strong denunciation of those who treated members of other races as inferior. He explicitly based this on the Catholic teaching on the dignity of the human person: "Should not reason and justice and every noble instinct of civilised man, and particularly of every Christian man, rebel at the thought of despising or branding with a stigma of inferiority, our neighbour with whom we share so much in common?". Throughout the letter, he repeatedly contrasted the attitudes and actions of the Government of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland and the white minority with those that he regarded as authentically Christian. The specific problems that he concentrated on were those of the confiscation of land, and governmental control of education. In particular he condemned the difference in educational opportunity available to children of the two racial groups, and accused the government of obstructing efforts by Christian missionaries to improve educational provision for black children: "Missionaries have been waiting, quite literally for years, for permission from the State to open the most elementary kind of village schools which the African people require and demand and are willing to erect at their own expense; and the applications, detailed and in writing, are still ungranted." UDI The Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland was broken up at the end of December 1963. Southern Rhodesia reverted to being a self-governing Crown colony in its own right when the Federation ended. When Ian Smith came to power in Salisbury and declared Southern Rhodesia's independence as Rhodesia in November 1965,