Muttering softly, a man in a priest's collar, baggy sweater and pants two inches too short for his legs puttered distractedly about the office of the Roman Catholic archbishop, Pius Ncube, one recent Saturday, getting things in order for the archbishop's next meeting.
He swept papers off one corner of a cluttered desk to create writing space. He searched the dust-covered bookshelves for the archbishop's résumé. He fixed a stubborn electrical outlet. He answered the phone when the receptionist failed to pick it up.
He was so completely the spit-and-image of a preoccupied assistant that nearly 10 minutes passed before it finally dawned upon a visitor that the man was no assistant at all, but the archbishop himself.
Which drew a small smile. Ncube is accustomed to being underestimated.
For years, Zimbabwe's president, Robert Mugabe, treated the archbishop as beneath his notice, even when he called him a liar, a cheat and a despot willing to starve his own people to stay in power. Mugabe left it to aides to pityingly characterize the clergyman as "quite unwell" or "mad."
But that was before this winter, when the archbishop began an all-out assault on Mugabe beyond Zimbabwe's borders. In March, he began soliciting foreign donations to a legal defense fund for Zimbabweans who allege human rights abuse; he has collected about $130,000 so far. In July, he held a press conference in London to argue that Mugabe was terrorizing Zimbabweans and reducing them to paupers while the world looked the other way.
Now the gloves are off. In May, Mugabe called the archbishop "an unholy man" and another Desmond Tutu, whom he dismissed as "an angry, evil and embittered little bishop." Last week, Mugabe accused Ncube of "satanic" betrayal of Zimbabwe, suggesting he had had invited the nation's archenemy, Britain, to invade.
That is the nice version. In the state-controlled press, Ncube said, he is vilified as gay, a rapist and HIV-positive.
Ncube's admirers also compare him to Desmond Tutu. But they mean it as high praise. The retired Anglican archbishop won a Nobel Peace Prize for challenging South Africa's apartheid regime and remains to many on this continent the model of a clergyman as a moral leader.
Like Tutu, said Ray Motsi, the Baptist pastor in Bulawayo, "Pius is a beacon of light. He is a very brave person, very single-minded. He has been able to discern the moment and understand what is the most important role he can play. That has been a very good thing for us."
Not all clergymen are so supportive. Many churches in Zimbabwe have been torn are rent apart under Mugabe, torn divided among between those who back him, fear him, openly oppose him or simply don't want to hear about politics in a house of prayer.
The Catholic Church, the biggest of Zimbabwe's Christian denominations, is no exception. For years it was split between Ncube of Bulawayo and Archbishop Patrick Chakaipa of Harare, a friend of Mugabe. After Chakaipa died last year, Pope John Paul II replaced him with a bishop much closer to Ncube.
Church insiders tend to read that as a sign that the hierarchy in Rome thinks the archbishop of Bulawayo is on the right path. But some Catholic bishops, priests and nuns in Zimbabwe do not share that view. Ncube said that some have asked him to back off.
"They think I am speaking too much, that I am too aggressive, not diplomatic," he said, perched behind a simple wooden desk cluttered with files. "I say I can not be diplomatic when there is so much suffering. I have to talk straight."
"We must defend the people who are suffering. Who else will defend them?"
Pius Ncube was born in 1946 in a cattle-loading town about an hour south of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe's second-largest city. His parents were peasants who raised sheep, goats and cattle. Catholic schools, Ncube has said, taught him to put faith first. "After a year or two, you really knew what you believed," he told an interviewer. He entered a Zimbabwean seminary at age 21. When his country won independence from Britain in 1980 and Mugabe came to power, he was studying for his master's degree in theology in Rome.
But he was back home three years later when the new government went after rebels from Ncube's own ethnic minority of Ndebeles in southeastern Zimbabwe, then a stronghold for a rival political party. Ndebele leaders claim thousands of innocent villagers were murdered.
That drew Ncube, then a parish priest, firmly into the human rights arena. He helped the former archbishop of Bulawayo take statements from witnesses but never managed to convince the Zimbabwe's bishops' council to endorse the 1997 account by a Catholic commission.
Ncube has now gone far beyond compiling reports to sit on a shelf. From his archbishop's platform, he is perhaps the president's most vocal and powerful critics - influential enough to make Mugabe insinuate that only his priestly robes protect him from the treatment he deserves.
The archbishop accuses Mugabe's ZANU-PF party of torturing, beating, imprisoning and murdering members of the opposition. He insists that the government has forced the United Nations to scale back a feeding program so it can use government stocks to reward supporters and punish dissidents.
"They burn homes," he said. "They kill people. They torture people with electricity. They intimidate people to make them feel afraid." In a meeting last year, he said, he and other Catholic bishops put the case directly to Mugabe, who himself attended Catholic school and was married in the church.
"We told him to control this. It hasn't stopped," said the archbishop. "We can not change this man."
The archbishop's solution is more international pressure from the United Nations and from African countries, a position endorsed last week at a regional conference of Catholic bishops. Eloquence and charisma are not in the archbishop's repertoire. His sermons "are all over the place," said Nigel Johnson, a Jesuit priest in Bulawayo.
"What he has got," Johnson said, "is a passion for the people of his diocese." Thus when the ever-vigilant police pick up a dissident on a trumped-up charge, Johnson and others say, the archbishop makes sure his family is informed and has enough food.
He said he ignores the government intelligence officers, who sit in on all of the church services, and who last year warned him that criticism of the government was not allowed. When an emissary from the government last year offered him a farm, he said, he sent her packing.
He answers not to Mugabe, he said, but to the book on his desk. One recent Saturday, he flipped it open and he found Luke 4:16. "Free the oppressed," he read aloud. "This is our calling."