Elder Edward Dube isn’t expecting to sleep much in the early hours of Sunday, March 1.
The member of the Presidency of the Seventy of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints likely will be awake as the Harare Zimbabwe Temple is dedicated nine time zones away in his native country.
“You don’t have to be there to enjoy the spirit that this brings. But it’s a time you really want to be awake,” he told the Church News, adding, “I will be there with my prayers, my thoughts in Zimbabwe.”
Those thoughts will vary from reflecting on his own temple experiences and how the temple grounds have been “sacred ground” for him for decades to pondering the immediate and future blessings of a temple in Harare.
And he anticipates being flooded with WhatsApp texts from friends there sharing their experiences and thoughts. He was similarly inundated with messages during last month’s temple open house.
Elder Dube — who has served as branch president, district president, stake president and mission president in the capital city of Harare — is one of the many longtime Zimbabwean Latter-day Saints who have endured the absence of a nearby house of the Lord and experienced the financial sacrifices and long travel to make temple covenants.
First introduced to the gospel in 1984 by members of a branch in Kwekwe (more than 130 miles or 215 kilometers southwest of Harare), Elder Dube read the Book of Mormon on his own, with no missionaries in the area. He remembers being touched when learning of the temple where the resurrected Jesus Christ visited the Nephites and ministered to them one by one.
“I felt the love of the Savior. I felt as though He was inviting me personally,” he recalled, continuing to learn about temples. “And so that imprint, that goal of the temple — I made a goal that day I would be married in the temple.”
Following his conversion, he served as a missionary in his native country from 1986 to 1988. The mission’s office, home and training center were located on the site where the temple now stands. While Africa’s first temple, in Johannesburg, South Africa, opened in 1985, he — like many native missionaries then across the continent, so far away from the temple — served without being endowed.
After his mission, Elder Dube and Sister Naume Dube were civilly married in December 1989, but they needed to sacrifice and save for years before making their first temple covenants as individuals and a couple.
“We could not afford to go to the temple — it took us that long,” he said, recalling the 14- to 18-hour one-way trips to Johannesburg, with long travel compounded by extensive delays at border crossings.
The Dubes were sealed in the Johannesburg South Africa Temple in May 1992.
In the mid-1990s, Elder Dube and his district presidency set a goal to help take 20 couples to Johannesburg to do their temple endowments and sealings — well before the Church’s current General Temple Patron Assistance Fund and on-site temple-patron accommodations. Members saved money, and the district helped to pool the resources and organize the trip.
Arrangements were made with a member family living in the temple neighborhood for the group to stay with for a week. But when the woman saw the old, smokey bus coming down with a large group to stay in their five-bedroom home, she rushed into the street to protest.
Elder Dube recalls taking her into her home to talk privately, giving her a promise. “We’ll leave your house as it is. If you’re concerned about your neighbors, we are reverent people. … Your neighbors will not even know what has happened,” he told her, then showing her bundles of South African rand to cover expenses and their stay.
“We did it that year and for the following three years — doing the same thing, bringing 20 couples into a five-bedroom house where we would have the sisters on one side of the house and brothers on the other and spending a week there. It was just remarkable.”
Elder Dube was serving as first counselor in the Africa South Area presidency when asked to preside over the Dec. 12, 2020, groundbreaking for the Harare temple. And he last saw the temple during his “summer vacation” in Harare during the December 2025 holiday break.
He says his wish is to help all — “particularly my fellow Zimbabweans” — know of Heavenly Father and the Savior, Jesus Christ, and that They are mindful of them and the temple is to bless them. “It really is the house of the Lord,” he said. “And as they do everything necessary to prepare themselves to be in His house, they will find peace and joy in this life.”
