Kamuzu Banda's Repression of Jehovah's Witnesses

Below are Time magazine reports for December 1972 and 1975 on the repression of Jehovah's witnesses in Malawi. It sheds some light on what really happened for the Jehovah's witnesses to be persecuted by the state and Malawi Congress Party cadres.

Time Magazine Dec 1972

By all accounts, a virtual pogrom is in progress against the 22,000 Jehovah's Witnesses in the African nation of Malawi. The Witnesses have been outlawed there since 1967 on the grounds that they are "dangerous to the government," but they have persisted as an underground church. Malawi President-for-life Dr. H. Kamuzu Banda, a staunch elder in Malawi's Presbyterian Church of Central Africa, has become increasingly angered by the "devil's Witnesses," their unwillingness to join his ruling Congress Party, their refusal to take loyalty oaths, and their exclusivist claims to religious truth. A Congress Party convention in September demanded that the Witnesses be expelled from their jobs and property, and since then party zealots have been carrying out the mandate with fervor. One company with 200 employees was shut down because it refused to fire a Witness who worked there. Huts have been burnt, and as many as 60 Witnesses may have been killed. Most of the Witnesses have fled to a calamitously overcrowded refugee camp across the border in Zambia, where an estimated 19,000 have been fighting among themselves for the meager water supply. As many as nine are dying daily, mostly children. Said a distressed Zambian official last week: "Only a change of heart by Dr. Banda can save them."

Time Dec 1975

"My kingdom is not of this world," Jesus said. To Jehovah's Witnesses, who now number more than 2 million worldwide, that is a command to boycott all political activity. Various nations have found this irksome, but few have matched the violence of Malawi's response. During a 1972 crackdown by President-for-life Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda, a Presbyterian elder, Malawi Witnesses were robbed, beaten, raped, even murdered. Thousands fled to neighboring Zambia, which shipped most of them back to Malawi. Eventually, about 34,000 found refuge in Portuguese Mozambique.

No sooner did Mozambique gain independence last June, however, than the new republic required everyone to join "dynamization groups" and bone up on Marxism. When the Witnesses balked, they were forced back to Malawi. There they have steadfastly refused to buy 34¢ cards that would make them members of Banda's Congress Party. The penalty: loss of homes and jobs. Hundreds of Witnesses are dying of starvation or disease. Young party thugs are also subjecting them to renewed violence. Awake!, the Witnesses' semimonthly U.S. newspaper, says that Malawi's "record reeks of beastliness, of insensibility to any standards of decency."