The problem of the archive is a well-worn topic for historians. But sometimes the sheer contingency of the historical record—what we can and cannot learn about the past through documentation—is so glaring that it demands comment. I had this in mind as I came across records of a twenty-something Australian missionary named Ian Grey, who was stopped by the Mozambican border guards in 1987 as he tried to cross over into neighboring Malawi. It had been more than a decade since Mozambican freedom fighters overthrew Portuguese colonialism only to find themselves in a prolonged civil war. The border guards who questioned Grey worked for the Marxist ruling party, Frelimo. As they went through his belongings and thumbed through his diaries, they noticed reference after reference to Renamo, the anti-communist militia fighting the Mozambican government. (The U.S. State Department compared Renamo to the Khmer Rouge and accused it of frequently resorting to rape, mutilation, forced labor, and arbitrary executions). Grey was taken into custody and soon put on trial. His arrest, a result of a young man’s decision to document his ties to the Renamo militia, reverberated some 8,000 miles to the United States and documented a series of relationships that would have otherwise been lost to historians.
Soon after his arrest, Grey confessed to being a Renamo “messenger boy.” He explained to the international press corps that his Pentecostal missionary group brought equipment and supplies to Renamo and smuggled out information, which it quickly relayed to the militia’s allies outside Mozambique. This work for Renamo was performed by an international crew but one supported and heavily subsidized by Americans. Among its benefactors were televangelists Pat Robertson, Jim and Tammy Faye Baker, and countless Pentecostal and evangelical churches from coast to coast.
Had it not been for Ian Grey’s blunder, we may not have known many of the details of evangelicals’ work in Mozambique. Without the historical record created around his trial, we would have a more sanitized version of events. Of course, every historian must reckon with how the figures they study purposefully obscure some of the more unsavory aspects of their past. But the issues posed by the archives are especially acute for the history of American evangelicals.