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out of hatred and violence

Stephen Lungu

Stephen Lungu had a pretty tough start to life.

He was born in Harare in Zimbabwe when it was still called Salisbury in Rhodesia, in the last days of the white minority rule. His teenage mother left her arranged marriage to a much older man and abandoned Stephen, aged three, and his younger brother and sister to the reluctant care of an aunt.

For the next few years, Stephen experienced abuse and hard times in orphanages and with relatives. He began staying out at nights and drifted into life on the streets, sleeping under bridges, scavenging food from the rubbish bins of well-off whites, and stealing when he could.

Then, in his early teens, his mother returned, and Stephen met her on one of his rare visits to his aunt's house. But Stephen felt so much hate for her he threw a knife at her, narrowly missing. In despair, he fled and tried to hang himself - again, he didn't succeed.

As a young teen, illiterate and with little hope of meaningful work, Stephen joined other friends to form an urban gang, the Black Shadows. At first it was a way to find identity and to express their violent urges. They combined criminal activity - robbery at knifepoint, occasional rape (which Stephen found distatsteful and did not participate in) - with violence and thuggery.

By now it was the late 1950s, and the movement to achieve black majority government in Rhodesia was attractive to young blacks. They had justice on their side, and poverty and powerlessness to fuel their anger. Members of the Black Shadows, including Stephen, were recruited into the liberation struggle, indoctrinated and trained. More and more, his anger and despair were directed towards the colonial whites and the white man's God, who seemed to justify the oppression of the blacks.

Soon he was joining in a welter of revolutionary activities - petrol bomb attacks in parks, beer gardens, churches, political meetings and even police cars. Then in May 1962, Stephen, aged just 16, joined a group of a dozen heading for the local shopping centre to petrol bomb a bank.

Their path from the black township to the shopping centre took them through an open field, and on this evening they were surprised to find a large tent had been erected. For a moment they thought it was a circus, but then they heard the sound of singing. It was a christian mission.

Stephen's hatred of the white man's religion welled up and he took on leadership of the group and hastily arranged a plan to spread out around the outside of the tent, and mount a coordinated petrol bomb attack on the tent at 7:00 pm, when he blew a whistle.

But it was still five minutes to seven, so the group went inside "for two minutes" to check it out. They sang out of key deliberately, and Stephen pulled a knife when an official asked them to stop. They were about to leave when the novelty of a pretty young black girl getting up to talk caused him to stay.

Intrigued, Stephen listened as the girl, from Soweto in South Africa, told of her life and her faith in Jesus. Deep inside he felt a yearning for something better than the dirty life he was living.

Then the preacher got up and talked of violence and death, sin and forgiveness, despair and hope. Stephen wanted to talk to him, and moved to the front of the tent. Then violence erupted as petrol bombs were thrown and people fled. In the midst of the violence, Stephen and the preacher talked.

Stephen could not believe his life had any hope, even with Jesus. But the preacher listened to Stephen's story with compassion, then told him his own story, of abandonment at birth and a similar sense of despair, until "God took him up" (a reference to Psalm 27 in the Bible, which says "Though my mother and father forsake me, the Lord will take me up.")

This was exactly what Stephen needed, and he left the tent that night, creeping through the darkness outside where the chaos was being dispelled by the riot squad, with a new faith in Jesus and a sense of hope and peace he had never known before. Lying in the dirt under the bridge, he sensed God tell him he would speak to many others about Jesus.

Stephen learnt to read, married and had children and became a christian evangelist. This calling led him into many adventures, dangers and difficulties. Now in his sixties, he is the head of Africa Enterprise, a large mission, reconciliation and social welfare organisation that operates throughout the continent. He has travelled internationally, talked with Presidents and politicians, drug addicts and murderers, and been reconciled to both his parents, who now also follow Jesus.

Truly, God has "taken him up".

Read more about Stephen Lungu in his book, "Out of the Black Shadows" or read about Africa Enterprise.

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