Rhodesia Unafraid: What Terrorism Was Really Like For Villagers & Farmers

The savagery unleashed on innocent families, black and white, by cowardly Communist terrorists was brutal. An ungodly alliance between Churches and atheistic Communists was exposed and opposed by Rev Arthur Lewis. He fought against this Marxist “liberation theology” and its emphasis on Christians wallowing “in contrived guilt-complexes” for our skin colour and achievements. This article provides a brief introduction to Rev. Arthur Lewis followed by one of his most insightful, and prescient, letters.

Warning: Some images maybe disturbing.

Excerpt from a TRIBUTE TO REV. ARTHUR LEWIS by Dr Peter Hammond:

Born in England, by age 19 Arthur Lewis was convinced that he was called to be a missionary. He studied at Oxford University where his lecturers included J.R.R.Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. He joined the Church of England’s University Mission to Central Africa and in 1947 began his half century of missionary service on this continent. Rev. Arthur Lewis spent 11 years serving at various mission stations in Tanganyika (now Tanzania) and managed to preach fluently in Swahili.

In 1958 Arthur Lewis married Gladys and moved to Rhodesia. Their first appointment to St. Faith’s Mission in Rusape proved to be something of a nightmare. While the mission had once been very successful, social work and the attached farm had come to take over and the Gospel work was side-lined. Rev. Lewis soon discovered that the farm was also used as a front for a communist revolutionary movement. After much hard work and a determined struggle, Arthur Lewis was able to re-establish the Church and Mission as a dynamic Christian enterprise.

It was Rev. Arthur Lewis who first exposed the insidious spread of liberation theology and the devious work of the World Council of Churches in using church funds to advance communist terrorist movements. His book, Christian Terror, created a sensation as it documented how missionaries, pastors and other Christians were being brutally murdered in Rhodesia by Robert Mugabe’s ZANU terrorists and Joshua Nkomo’s ZAPU who were the recipients of generous World Council of Churches funding. As a result even Readers Digest picked up the scandalous story and the Salvation Army and Baptists withdrew from membership with the WCC in protest.

An extract from Christian Terror, page 69.
The full book is available online for free here courtesy
of Dr Peter Hammond.

From: Window On Rhodesia – The Jewel Of Africa

Letter By Reverend Arthur Lewis

In a Rhodesian hospital there is a victim of the terrorist war paralysed from the neck downwards. When he can no longer restrain the tears he cannot wipe his eyes. There are others, in hospitals throughout the country, who have been desperately wounded in the defence of this lovely land or reduced to human wrecks by landmines.

Christians hear much of this “armed struggle” for “liberation”. The reality is a group of black children driving an ox-cart: next moment there is an ear-splitting blast and all that is left is a few arms and legs. Or a white smallholder drives home with his wife and children. A hail of bullets from the bush means the end of a family that has lived and loved together. Or perhaps it is a midnight raid on a lonely, unarmed mission. The staff are left dead, the children abducted to train as “freedom fighters”.

The truth about the “freedom fighters”, lauded by church organisations throughout the world, is that they know nothing about freedom and seldom fight. They hit and run. If the Rhodesian forces pursue them over our borders there is an international outcry, and the dollars and the arms flow in from the member states of the United Nations to the “victims of aggression”.

On June 23, 1978 terrorists massacred eight Missionaries and their four young children
at the Elim Pentecostal Church Mission. The youngest child was three week old
Pamela Grace who was beaten to death by “freedom fighters” .

Courage Black And White

The courage and endurance of our multiracial security forces in tracking this elusive foe, communist trained and armed, is quite astounding. One can only guess the hardships they endure, though we know too well the price that some have paid. The bitterest pill is that the communists (with the aid of Churches and powerful radio-transmitters) have persuaded people overseas and uncounted black Rhodesians that the attacks on soft targets are the work of the Rhodesian forces themselves. Ballistic evidence and established facts are powerless against the world-wide propaganda-machine, secular and ecclesiastical.

The sufferings of the ordinary tribespeople are insufficiently known in Rhodesia and virtually unheard of outside. Burnt, beaten, tortured and raped by terrorists, caught in crossfire between friend and foe, detesting terrorism but paralysed by fear: these people find relief at last in the protected villages and the unhappy abandonment of their traditional lifestyle.

In this sea of troubles some of the bravest men and women are the white farmers and their wives: they fight our battles, produce our food, care for their labour-forces and suffer enormous losses of cattle – stolen, maimed, hamstrung or slaughtered by terrorists. If you want to find faith and confidence go to the farms. One mother fought off terrorists, with her 13-year-old son re-loading for her, till she could fight no more. Putting her arms round her two children she said:

“We are all going to die tonight, but we must be very brave. No tears.”

The three survived.

Seldom has a small country, whose ordinary people want only to live in peace with each other, been so universally, so unjustly and so viciously besieged.

On July 15, 1977, a group of terrorists entered a kraal in the Rushinga area,
East of Mt. Darwin. An entire family – 23 men, women, children and babies – were first beaten, and then herded into a hut which was subsequently set on fire. There were no survivors.
December 3, 1975  A terrorist gang, known as “freedom fighters”, cut off the ears, nose and chin from Chikombe Mazvidza of Kandeya Tribal Trust Land.  They then forced
his wife to cook and eat the flesh. A burning ember was thrust into his mother’s
genitals and two other locals were also assaulted. His five children and 60 villagers
were forced to watch.
Image and caption from Christian Terror by Rev. Arthur Lewis.

Why Rhodesia fights

Let it be said at once that even if we wanted to hand over to a “transitional government” the internecine factions struggling for power (and loot) are not capable of forming one. None has a policy. They cannot agree: and nothing – least of all UNO [United Nations Organisation] – will persuade them to stop their attacks while outsiders encourage, finance and arm them. Terrorism has become a way of life: the new savagery.

An American visitor to Mozambique wrote of the

“bizarre spectacle of a time machine running in reverse: an African country inexorably reverting to the bush.”

When the Portuguese fled Mozambique there was only one faction to take over. Rhodesia’s position, if we gave in, would not be Mozambique’s but that of Angola, once the gem of Africa. In Angola there can be no ordinary tyranny. The factions fight an endless war of attrition leading (with sophisticated weaponry) to something darker than the Dark Ages and worse than the primeval jungle. This has no attraction for Rhodesians, who together have built a modern state in what was a primitive wilderness. Too fresh in our minds is the fact that from the Portuguese territories 600 000 fled as refugees, leaving their possessions, their lives’ work and their dead.

It must not, of course, be inferred that there are no responsible black politicians in Rhodesia. The problem is that Britain and UNO are not interested.

What Choice then, but to fight back?

Partly, of course, it is a fight for survival: and we are surviving remarkably well. Normality reigns over much of the country. Family life, albeit disrupted, continues. Parliamentary government goes on. In many places the churches are full. Cultural life and sport still flourish. Industries and commerce battle but prosper. The streets of our towns and cities are thronged with people and often crowded with traffic. Some of the holiday resorts are well frequented, and people know how to enjoy themselves.

Here in the heart of Africa we have a semi-Christian, free enterprise society deriving from an older West. It is a society whose sturdiness and resilience makes today’s West look sick; and it belongs to all our peoples. We are even managing to press on with social reforms, though external pressures make this ever more difficult – each advance being matched by a new turn of the sanctions screw.

Unite For A Christian Future

But this is only part of the truth. Deep in our hearts we know that we belong to the greatest of civilisations, built over the centuries on the Christian Faith which in Africa millions of black people have gladly accepted. If Christendom has forgotten its calling Southern Africa has not, Values and standards of integrity which are laughed at in Britain and America still count here, though the battle against their erosion knows no respite. Nor is this all. “Here we have no continuing city, but we seek one to come”, We are free to preach and to practise the Everlasting Gospel on which man’s eternal salvation depends. Many Churches are sick with the “social gospel” of the Marxist fellow-travellers. But the Spirit is at work both within the Churches and outside them.

The struggle essentially has nothing to do with white and black. Left alone, these have agreed in the past and can agree in the future. We shall not be left alone: but such an agreement must now be our all-out effort.

The Russians would overthrow us by weapons, placed in other people’s hands. The American and British Governments would talk us over the precipice, backing their talk with the most venomous campaign of international persecution in history – but with nothing which calls for a milligramme of courage. The object in both cases is identical: a black government – as distinct from the multiracial best-man government for which we work and pray – that must inevitably fall under Russian Marxist domination. The prize is our minerals and strategic importance: people do not matter.

There is no merely political answer, though statesmanship has its necessary place in gaining time and choosing lesser evils. But Christianity has three definite things to say:

(1) We must find a pathway through the smokescreen of falsehood to the true issue.  Marxism and materialism are both evil: our struggle must be for the freest practicable society in which the Gospel can be taught and lived. And it must be no no-win war.

(2) We are to repent of our sins, not our virtues. We are NOT going to repent of the colour of our skins or our civilised achievement. Christians ask forgiveness. They do not wallow in contrived guilt-complexes.

(3) Repent we must, and turn to God. The stirrings of a true religious revival are already evident. If – and only if – we turn to Him can we confidently expect His intervention. The Lord can save by many or by few. Neither Kissinger nor Geneva brought us down, and it is not beyond the wit of God to find more immediate diversions to occupy the Kremlin, Dr Owen and Mr Carter.

The Rhodesia Christian group is a religious body which cannot prescribe political solutions. But our President has asked for prayer for guidance as we go forward to reach an internal agreement which will enable reasonable Rhodesians of all races to present a united front. This prayer we must earnestly offer – and back it with action.

“Here in the heart of Africa … is a society whose sturdiness and resilience makes a shining example to the rest of the world.”

A Tribute to Rev. Arthur Lewis

Rev Arthur Lewis passed in 2017, aged 89 years. In a tribute to Rev Lewis, Dr Peter Hammond mentioned stated:

“Arthur Lewis’s courage in using his writing and speaking skills to expose the duplicity and treachery of the liberation theologians and the World Council of Churches made him a major voice for Rhodesia. In 1976 he was elected to the Rhodesian Senate and the Church of England granted him temporary leave to accept this responsibility.
After the betrayal of Rhodesia in 1980 the Lewis’s moved to South Africa and he was assigned to a congregation in Phalaborwa. In 1987, after a half century of missionary service in Africa, the Lewis’ “retired” to England.”

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4 Responses

  1. AnnE says:

    A very courageous man for speaking the truth at a time when it was only acceptable to vilify White Rhodesians and to promote their demise. They suceeded.
    Very appropriate timing with 2019 CHRISTmas celebrations beginning.
    It’s past time that ‘the West’ put the CHRIST back into Christmas and this article reveals how the world around us will continue to deteriorate if we don’t.
    Today Zimbabwe Ruins provides its citizens and businesses with 18 hour long DAILY power blackouts – except in the wee hours of the night when everyone needs to be sleeping – and insists dead bodies are kept at home as the morgues have no electricity to preserve them. Shame on the West, UN and communist nations Russia, East Germany, China and the ‘religious’ WCC and OAU for de-constructing Rhodesia into Zimbabwe Ruins basket case out of the once breadbasket of Africa.

  2. AnnE says:

    Message from Rhodesia to the World:

    Urge neither charity or shame to me;
    Uncharitably with me have you dealt,
    And shamefully by you my hopes are butchered.

    Shakespeare

    (source: Requiem for Rhodesia by Carlos W Porter)

  1. August 30, 2020

    […] we Rhodesian’s know, the World Council of Churches and ALL Western Governments were promoting Liberation Ideology which required that they actively […]

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