REMOVING THE BARRIER OF SEPARATE DEVELOPMENT

While this was going on, someone else appeared on the scene who was to contribute much toward more firmly establishing the work, especially in the Bulawayo area. This was Willie McGregor, who, at 80 years of age, is serving as an elder in one of the Bulawayo congregations. Brother McGregor, who was baptized in Scotland in 1924, came to Zimbabwe in 1929 as a young bank clerk. In 1933 he settled in Bulawayo. There he proved to be very useful to the brothers during some very difficult years.

Please keep in mind that during all these years the government was very uncooperative toward the Witnesses, especially with regard to the African brothers. As Robert Nisbet put it: “The opposition from both the government and many white Rhodesians had been, humanly speaking, overwhelming.” The opposers exerted constant effort to prevent the Kingdom message from spreading into the vernacular field.

In view of this, it is interesting to learn about the first organized interracial Watchtower Study in the country. It was conducted by means of two translators. But let Willie McGregor tell it:

“When the study had been in progress for about half an hour, we saw 12 to 15 mounted police approaching us. This caused a certain nervousness. I asked the brothers to continue our study just as we had been doing. On arrival, the police circled the study (held in the open under a tree) a short distance away but within earshot and with the heads of the horses pointing toward us. The police remained until the closing prayer when, at a signal, they turned their horses and rode off.” No arrests, no interference. Was this a breakthrough of the barrier of separate development? Small indeed. But it was a start.

LEGAL BATTLES ESTABLISH THE GOOD NEWS

Not having been able to prevent the truth from getting well rooted in Zimbabwe, officials took a new turn in their opposition. In fact, the year 1936 began a decade of what turned out to be the most intense official persecution in the history of the work in this country.

In that year the government enacted the Sedition Act and declared 14 of the Society’s publications to be seditious. In 1937 this resulted in a test case that was heard in the courts. Here is how Willie McGregor describes what happened:

“The decision of the Magistrate of Bulawayo that the publications were seditious was appealed, and the High Court at Bulawayo found the publications not to be seditious under the Sedition Act.” Showing how determined the government of that time was to stop the distribution of our Bible literature, “the government then appealed this decision to the Appellate Division at Bloemfontein, South Africa. In March 1938 that court upheld the judgment of the High Court, Bulawayo, that the literature was not seditious and dismissed the appeal with costs.”

This case resulted in a fine witness. The Bulawayo Chronicle reported the court’s opinion in full. George Phillips, from the Society’s Cape Town office, sat beside the Society’s counsel in court and helped him to find appropriate scriptures and to explain extracts from the publications that had been declared to be seditious. The Society’s advocate, incidentally, was Mr. Hugh Beadle, who later became Chief Justice of Rhodesia (Zimbabwe).

Then in November 1940, the government took advantage of war hysteria and banned the importation and distribution of all the Society’s literature. The handful of brothers, along with such zealous ones as Jack and Bert McLuckie and Willie McGregor, decided to test the validity of this restriction. So out they went with the literature. That is when the fireworks began. The police made arrests! Court cases followed! At the start, most cases were thrown out of court. But this soon changed.

Quite a number of brothers landed in prison during those days, some for distributing banned literature and some over the issue of Christian neutrality. Among these was Willie McGregor. Brother McGregor, who by this time was a bank official, was dismissed from the bank. He says of his imprisonment: “I was the only prisoner in the European jail undergoing hard labor. Although others were sentenced for murder, robbery and violence of different kinds, they played chess and dominoes and read books to pass the time while I was put to work painting down the pipes and woodwork on the outside of the building.”

WINDS OF CHANGE IN THE 1940’S

The earlier part of this decade saw little change in official attitude toward the Kingdom work. In 1942 (the year Bert McLuckie spent another four and a half months in jail) the brothers took excerpts from the Yearbook and printed a booklet entitled Jehovah’s Witnesses: Who Are They? What Is Their Work? More arrests followed! The fact that there was no publisher’s name in the booklet made no difference. Among those arrested were Willie McGregor and Gerry Arsenis, a newly baptized Greek brother in Salisbury (now called Harare).

[Picture on page 122]

Willie McGregor went to Zimbabwe in 1929 and contributed greatly toward establishing the Kingdom work in the Bulawayo area