Homecoming

"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-c- 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."

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