Snippets from the Audio Archive IV – Sister Janice McLaughlin and Ruth Weiss

In this extract from an interview Ruth Weiss conducted with
Maryknoll Sister Janice McLaughlin (1942–2021) in Harare (Zimbabwe)
on 30th July 1982, Sister Janice reflects on her decision to move
to Rhodesia where she worked for the Catholic Commission for
Justice and Peace in 1977. Documenting atrocities of the Zimbabwean
war of liberation she was arrested and deported, only to continue
to work from Mozambique. After Rhodesia gained its independence in
1980, Sister Janice returned to Zimbabwe to work as an education
consultant in the President's Office. She continued to work in
Zimbabwe until 1992 and returned to work in the country in the
areas of adult education, peacebuilding and combating human
trafficking from 1998 to 2009 and from 2015 to 2020. Ruth Weiss who
had lived in Rhodesia in the late 1960s and then was expelled, also
returned in 1980 to live and work in Zimbabwe. She soon started to
research the lives of women and interviewed Sister Janice as “an
important figure in the liberation struggle”, as she writes in her
book “The women of Zimbabwe” (1986).