Frontline Team Jailed in Zambia

October 1987

A team of four Frontline Fellowship members — including the Director of the Mission, a missionary from our U.K. Branch, and two field workers — were jailed in Zambia on 7th October.

The field team was in transit to Malawi with a 4-wheel-drive vehicle filled with Gospel booklets, evangelistic records and tracts, medical supplies and Bibles for Mozambiquan refugees. Arrested at Kazangulu, after refusing to bribe Zambian officials, the team were escorted under armed guard to Livingstone, where they were roughly handled and deprived of their shoes.

The vehicle was searched by a dozen plain-clothed policemen, with another 40 policemen, soldiers and militia as spectators. Despite the Chief Inspector declaring at the end of the day that he was satisfied that the team were not car rying any military hardware or lethal weapons and that they obviously were missionaries, the team was later physically abused and roughly man-handled into stinking concrete cells covered in human filth, and deprived of water for over 20 hours.

On the afternoon of Thursday, 8th October, the missionaries were roughly dragged into a room filled with a dozen camouflaged Zambian soldiers armed with AK47 assault rifles with bayonets attached. Our men were then handcuff ed to one another, blindfolded and, still barefoot, escorted at the point of bayonets and rifle butts to Lusaka (550km away).
For the next two weeks our missionaries were incarcerated in the grossly overcrowded Lusaka Central Prison, and regularly interrogated by officials from the Zambian Special Branch, Military Intelligence and the President’s Office, sometimes with ANC officials in attendance.

Throughout the long days in Zambian detention, the Frontline field team held Bible studies, prayer meetings, church services, counseled and prayed with other prisoners and detainees, witnessed to their Interrogators, sang Gospel songs even when being driven under armed guard to prison, and steadfastly sought to glorify God even when sick with malaria, and in the deepest dark ness of the filth-ridden, mosquito- infested concrete cells.

By then, the Zambian investigations obviously must have confirmed that they had unnecessarily jailed four innocent foreign nationals in transit and interfered with a legitimate mercy mission to refugees in Malawi. So, after 16 days In Zambian custody, and amidst an international outcry over the detentions, the four Frontline missionaries were hastily driven to the Kazangulu ferry, re united with their vehicle and most of their equipment, and at mid-day on Thursday, 22nd October, were set free to drive back through Botswana to South Africa — and freedom.