Allan Anderson's Blogs

3 Forbes Avenue, BULAWAYO. November 1967. Once more we wish to send our best wishes… If anything we have had a busier time than usual this year. I have no African servant now, as we can’t afford one, so I do all my own housework, but I must say my family are most helpful. At the beginning of the year I had an unusual experience of being in charge of the Men’s Hostel while the Officers were away. This was something new for me, and I learned a lot in that month. One thing to which I could not get hardened was to see police taking off young fellows who were staying at the Hostel. I am still Chairman of the Women’s World Day of Prayer Committee, and of the Women’s Group Liaison which takes a good deal of my time, especially the W.G.L. which includes arranging united Training Courses, attendance at Working Party meetings in Salisbury, as well as Committee meetings. At our Annual General Meeting I tried to resign from Chairmanship, as I felt it was making too many demands on my time,...

  NOTE: Letters between June 1963 and November 1965 are missing from my files. We had our second “Homeland Furlough” from December 1964 to June 1965, although I had to return to Salisbury for the beginning of my ‘O Level’ year in January. It was my first air flight, in a Vickers VC 10. My parents were now returning to Rhodesia by boat from Southampton and train from Cape Town to their new appointment in Bulawayo, my father’s birthplace and where his parents had retired. His parents had spent their entire ministry in the London Missionary Society (Congregational) since their marriage in 1915 in rural area of this region (Shangani and Dombodema missions). Three Anderson generations before that were involved in the LMS in South Africa since the first William Anderson arrived in Cape Town in 1800. His younger brother Alec and oldest sister Sheila and their families (eight of my cousins!) were also living there. At one stage two other sisters and their families lived in Bulawayo, so we ...

Since posting the first four groups of newsletters, I have had some encouraging comments from friends who have read them. I did not anticipate that my mother's words would have such impact over half a century later. But in particular, I would like to highlight the comments received from two Zimbabwean women academics who work in a British university, who I know personally. I have their permission to publish their comments but for the moment they remain anonymous. The first one is here: Your mother’s letters are powerful and offer an amazing and refreshing window into the missionary world of that time in ways that I’ve not seen in the literature about missionaries that I’ve read. As such the suggestion for you to turn the blog into a book is an excellent one. I can also imagine a movie/documentary type!!! Additionally, ‘seeing’ the environment you grew up in and the kinds of people your parents and grandparents were and the kind of person you became is also testimony to the many pos...

NOTE: My parents’ first term in Zambia was only two years, and they were to return later as Officers Commanding the Zambia Command, which was separated from Rhodesia after Zambian independence in 1964. They were sent back to the Howard Institute, the largest rural Army mission station in the Territory; this time Dad was appointed Principal. Carol and I had to change schools again. After only six months in boarding school in Lusaka, I went to Prince Edward School (a boys’ boarding school in Salisbury/ Harare) and Carol went to Routledge primary school next to Prince Edward in Belvedere, for the first time as a boarder. This is quite a controversial letter, at least for me it is reading it almost half a century later! Some of my mother’s comments are looking at the consequences rather than the causes of a liberation struggle going on in what was a European settler-ruled country, where Africans were segregated and did not have the right to vote. The Rhodesian white-ruled government declar...