This year is the 30th Anniversary of the massacre of 13 people on the Elim Mission station in the Vumba. To commemorate their sacrifice a special offering will be taken towards the extension of Memorial Church in Zimbabwe.

THE ELIM MISSION MASSACRE

On the night of June 23, 1978, Elim Mission in the Rhodesian Eastern Highlands was subjected
to the worst massacre of missionaries yet experienced. Terry Blocksidge reported in the Sunday
Mail (Salisbury):

Eight British missionaries and four young children - including a three-week-old baby -
were bayoneted to death by terrorists on Rhodesia's Eastern border on Friday night in
the worst massacre of whites since the six-year-old war began. Three of the missionaries were men and the others women. A sixth woman was stabbed and beaten and left for dead. She staggered 300 m into the freezing Vumba bush to spend the night before being found semi-conscious by security forces yesterday. Despite intensive care in a Salisbury hospital she subsequently died.

The gruesome murders, by a group of eight to 10 terrorists, happened at Emmanuel
Mission School - 15 km south-east of Umtali and 8 km from the Mozambique border
- once used as the Eagle boarding school.

The dead, who belonged to the Elim Pentecostal Church, were:
* Mr. Peter McCann (30), his wife, Sandra (also 30), son Phillip (six) and daughter
Joy (five).
* The Rev. Phillip Evans (29), his wife, Suzan (35), and their daughter Rebecca
(four).
* Mr. Roy Lynn (37), his wife, Joyce (36), and their daughter Pamela Grace. She
would have been three weeks old yesterday.
* Catherine Picken (55) and Elizabeth Wendy Hamilton- White (37).
* Miss Mary Fisher (28).

Most of the women had been sexually assaulted, and one mutilated.
The children had been dragged from their beds. Two children were in yellow pyjamas,
one with a red dressing gown, and a third in a flowery nightdress.
One child had her tiny thumbs clenched in her palms.
Even hardened security men were stunned by the bloody scene and stood around
silently. "The quiet is uncanny", said one.
Mr. Brian Chapman, director of the Church in Rhodesia and South Africa, visited the
scene yesterday. He said: "We saw no humanity here."

The massacre began shortly before 8.30 p.m. when the white families were forced by
the terrorists from their homes and classrooms, and marched to a playing field.
Near the sports pavilion, about 400 m from the main school, they were split into
groups, then beaten with lengths of wood and logs, and stabbed.

When security forces reached the scene yesterday, the full horror on the cold, mist-
and-rain shrouded Vumba mountainside confronted them:
A mother, beaten to death, lay with her young baby. The baby had also been savagely
beaten. Their arms stretched out to each other, their hands resting an inch apart. The child's
hand was clenched. The mother had a hand squeezed tightly around her engagement ring, turned into her
palm, as she reached for her baby in her dying moments.

Nearby, another woman had died from an axe-wound - the weapon still protruded
from her shoulder and two men, one with his hands tied behind his back, lay beaten
and slashed to death. A blood-soaked chunk of wood had been dropped near to them.
Three children lay in a pitiful huddle, with two women's bodies next to them.
Some had raised their arms to defend themselves from the brutal blows.