Qualla: Macha Mission

Macha Mission: Introduction

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A 120-year-old mission station in rural southern Zambia collaborates with Johns Hopkins on malaria research. Put that way, it sounds like an anomaly. It is not. Macha Mission, established in 1906 in Choma District, has spent a long time being useful to its neighbours in ways that matter. What began as a church and a school has accumulated a hospital, a nursing school, multiple primary and secondary schools, a malaria institute, a community radio station, and an aerodrome. The story of how those things got there involves American missionaries, the Tonga and Ila people they came among, and more than a century of negotiation between outside ambitions and local need.

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Macha Mission: The Founding

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Hannah Frances Davidson travelled north from Matopo Mission in Southern Rhodesia, present-day Zimbabwe, and arrived in 1906 with two African helpers and another American missionary, Adda Engle. She was sent by the Brethren in Christ, a small Anabaptist denomination with roots in ...

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Macha Mission: A Physician Arrives

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In the 1950s, Alvan Thuma, a Brethren in Christ physician from the United States, and his wife Ardys came to Macha. Under their work the clinic grew into a hospital with real surgical capacity. Their lives at Macha were documented later in the book First a Friend, a title that ca...

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Macha Mission: The Malaria Institute

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 2003 the Malaria Institute at Macha (MIAM) was formally established, building on decades of disease surveillance at the hospital. The institute partnered with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and has since conducted some of Africa's most consistent longitud...

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Macha Mission: Macha Works

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Around the mission a cooperative organisation called Macha Works has added layers of practical infrastructure: an aerodrome, a library, a craft shop, a restaurant, ICT training, a Christian school, and housing at what it calls Ubuntu Campus. A Jatropha farm once explored biofuel ...

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