My father, John Parry, who has died aged 92, was a missionary doctor who established Mbereshi hospital in what was then rural Northern Rhodesia, and guided it through that country’s transition from colonial protectorate to the independent nation of Zambia.
He was born in Oldham, Lancashire, one of three children of Reginald Parry, a Congregational minister, and Mary (nee Barrie). He attended Queen Elizabeth’s grammar school in Blackburn, then Hackney Downs secondary school in north London. His father instilled in him the values of his church and the London Missionary Society (LMS), such as racial equality and social justice. The explorer David Livingstone had been an LMS missionary, and John felt the call to follow in his footsteps. Studying medicine at Manchester and theology at Lancashire College, he qualified as both a doctor and a church minister. Along the way he married Freda Carter, a registered nurse, also from Lancashire.
Together they left in 1949 for Mbereshi mission in the remote Luapula valley, near the home of Mwata Kazembe, whom Livingstone had visited in 1867. With the support of the incumbent mwata (chief) and community leaders, my father expanded medical services in the small mission clinic, introducing surgery, notably of the eye. He also led church services and bible studies.
By 1958 he was superintendent of the new Mbereshi hospital with an operating theatre, an X-ray machine and a small pathology laboratory. Training programmes for nurses and medical assistants were set up, and preventive medicine programmes established.
John often had to improvise “bush surgery”, sometimes operating while reading from a surgical textbook. He once saved a child with a peanut stuck in an airway with the aid of forceps that had arrived only a few days before.
Hospital hours were long and hard, but it was a peaceful and attractive country, and my sister, brother and I were all born there. John and Freda learned the local language and welcomed Africans into their homes and social lives, something that was unthinkable to many white people. John became known as Ba Shikulu (grandfather). With other missionaries, he believed in self-determination and the Africanisation of missions. He became a member of Kenneth Kaunda’s independence party and, after independence, handed over both the hospital and himself to government service.
Returning to England in 1972 for family reasons, John embarked on a second career as a GP in Kirkham, Lancashire, also working as a stand-in minister for the United Reformed Church. He led his last church service at the age of 91.
After 63 years of marriage, Freda died in 2013. The couple’s three children, six grandchildren and five great-grandchildren survive them.
