Back in about 1978 we were travelling around Rhodesia singing and doing puppet shows, and my wife wanted to visit her sister who was married to a farmer. When we arrived at the farm I remember seeing a whole barn full of cotton that was burnt down, and two tractors that terrorists had destroyed by making fires under the engines to crack the engines.
I remember one night sitting alone in their living room watching the Muppet Show on their TV, when suddenly I heard a woman screaming: “Help, they are shooting at us!” It reminded me of some horror movie I saw once by mistake, and I didn’t know where the voice was coming from.
All of a sudden all the lights went off, and the woman kept on screaming. My brother-in-law told me that the neighbouring farm was being attacked by the terrorists. Apparently they had their own farmer’s communication system which was operated by a car battery. Apparently their farm electricity system was operated by a tractor running out in the garage somewhere which he switched off when the fighting started.
I asked my brother-in-law if we should go and help them but he said there is nothing we could do because there may be land mines on the road, and we would be ‘sitting ducks’ with the car lights on. He handed me a rifle and I went to bed with the rifle in my hands, staring at the window all night wondering when the terrorist would come through the window. They had geese that were walking around the house all night squawking, making an eerie sound like something out of a horror movie. I felt like I was in a James Bond movie. I thought of putting a dummy in the bed and sleeping on the cold concrete floor, but that didn’t appeal to me.
Eventually the screaming stopped, but I don’t think I slept a wink that night. I just stared at the window all night. Some years before that, we had visited them, and we slept in a different room. All that night I had heard noises on the roof and couldn’t sleep at all. The next morning I went outside and noticed that there was a tree next to the house, and the branches were over the roof. So the noises I heard all night were the branches scratching on the tin roof as the wind blew against the tree. Such weird stuff happened.
The next morning the neighbouring farmer and his family came to say goodbye as they headed for South Africa. Apparently the man was in the bath when the shooting started, and he jumped out and pulled on his shorts, and shot back at the terrorists. However, his pants kept falling down as he hadn’t done them up in the rush. The next morning he found that he had shot up his own Land Rover as he shot back at the terrorists. There was trail of blood, so apparently he had hit one of them.
Years later I heard the news that the farmer was murdered on a farm in South Africa. Years later my brother-in-law was also murdered in South Africa.
In our travels in Rhodesia we met a man from Mozambique who went to visit his fiancé. He found her and her parents were all murdered, so he buried them and fled to Umtali, Rhodesia (now Mutari, Zimbabwe). Apparently he couldn’t speak English and just stood at the railway station until some kind people took him in and cared for him. Later on he married an American girl and they immigrated to America. We visited them once in America on our travels.
We travelled all over Rhodesia ministering for Jesus during the war, and we could have been killed many times. It is just by the grace of God that we are still alive. I remember singing at a mission station in Penalonga, then a few years later I heard the news that the terrorists had attacked the mission station and killed all the missionaries.
There are so many stories to tell, but that would take a whole book. I remember going to sing at a church in Shabani (now Zvishavane), and there was a man outside the front door with a rifle and another man at the side door with a gun to keep us safe during the service.
Lots of the names in Rhodesia and South Africa have changed since the ‘One man, one vote’ system has come into play, and I don’t remember all the new names.
Many people have died terrible deaths during the wars, and at the same time there were many miracles and supernatural things happening. Again, it would take a whole book to go through all the stories. I guess every country on earth has gone through wars, and everyone gets affected in various ways. In the movie: ‘Good Morning Vietnam’ it mentions how Britain imposed an oil embargo on Rhodesia. Some people say that the war in Rhodesia was something like the war in Vietnam.
There are so many stories running through my head right now, that I am not sure what to share or not. I have written so many things already on my websites, but I don’t think many people read the things I have written because I am not famous.
I have met two mercenaries who fought in the Congo, but I cannot tell you the things they told me. What happened there is so terrible. Some of the things that happened in Rhodesia and Mozambique were also so terrible, that I cannot tell you. Some of my best friends got killed in Rhodesia. I also met three missionaries who worked in the Congo, and I heard some very strange things. The one missionary got out just in time or he would have been killed. It is not easy being a missionary.
One thing I know for sure is that we all die someday, and we must get saved before we go into eternity. Jesus paid the price for all our sins, so we must repent and get saved.
The missionary at Penalonga told me that one day he was preaching and said the Gospel was “free,” but the translator said the Gospel was “cheap.” So he stopped him and said it is not “cheap,” it cost Jesus his whole life!
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If you want to watch a movie of some of the things that happened in Africa, here is the English version. It looks like the beginning is in Kenya, but switching from Colonialism to self rule has happened in many different countries. This is an Italian movie. In the version I saw in Africa, the man making the movie gets killed in the last scene.
Africa Addio – Belgian Congo – (English talking version) 2.07 hrs