John Chilembwe
John Chilembwe was a Baptist pastor, educator and revolutionary from Nyasaland culture on European-owned plantations and the colonial government's failure to promote the social and political advancement of Africans. Soon after the outbreak of the First World War, Chilembwe organised an unsuccessful armed uprising against colonial rule, and was killed shortly thereafter by colonial forces. Today, Chilembwe is celebrated as a hero of independence in some African countries, and John Chilembwe Day is observed annually on 15 January in Malawi.
Early life
There is limited information about John Chilembwe's parentage and birth. An American pamphlet of 1914 claimed that John Chilembwe was born in Sangano, Chiradzulu District, in the south of what became Nyasaland, in June 1871. Joseph Booth also stated that Chilembwe's father was a Yao and his mother a Mang'anja slave, captured in warfare. This information was contemporary; in the 1990s, John Chilembwe's granddaughter stated that Chilembwe's father may have been called Kaundama, and was one of those who settled at Mangochi Hill during the Yao infiltration into Mang'anja territory, and that his mother may have been called Nyangu: his likely pre-baptismal name was Nkologo. However, other also quite recent sources give differing parental names. Chilembwe attended a Church of Scotland mission from around 1890.Influence of Joseph Booth
In 1892 he became a house servant of Joseph Booth, a radical and independent-minded missionary. Booth had arrived in Africa in 1892 as a Baptist to establish the Zambezi Industrial Mission near Blantyre. Booth was critical of the reluctance of Scottish Presbyterian missions to admit Africans as full church members, and later founded seven more independent missions in Nyasaland which, like the Zambezi Industrial Mission, focused on the equality of all worshippers. In Booth's household and mission, where he was closely associated with Booth, Chilembwe became acquainted with Booth's radical religious ideas and egalitarian feelings.Booth left Nyasaland with Chilembwe in 1897; he returned to Nyasaland alone in 1899 but left permanently in 1902, although he continued to correspond with Chilembwe. After 1906, Booth was strongly influenced by Millennialism, but the extent to which he retained influence over Chilembwe after 1902 or influenced him towards millennial beliefs is disputed, although Booth later strongly influenced Elliot Kenan Kamwana, the first leader of the Watchtower followers of Charles Taze Russell in Nyasaland.
Education in the United States and relations with American and African Independent Churches
In 1897 Booth and Chilembwe traveled together to the United States. Because of the difficulties the two encountered when traveling together in the United States, Booth introduced Chilembwe to the Reverend Lewis G Gordon, Foreign Missions Secretary of the National Baptist Convention, who arranged for the latter to attend the Virginia Theological Seminary and College, a small Baptist institution at Lynchburg, Virginia where he almost certainly studied African-American history.The principal was a radical African-American activist, Gregory Hayes, and Chilembwe both experienced the contemporary prejudice against Africans and Black Americans. He was exposed to ideas about Black self-determination, and the works of John Brown, Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass and others. He was ordained as a Baptist minister at Lynchburg in 1899. After completing his studies at Lynchburg in 1900, he returned to Nyasaland in 1900 with the blessing of the Foreign Missions Board and financial assistance from the National Baptist Convention.
For the first 12 years of his ministry after his return to Nyasaland, Chilembwe encouraged African self-respect and advancement through education, hard work and personal responsibility, as advocated by Booker T. Washington, His activities were initially supported by white Protestant missionaries, although his relations with Catholic missions were less friendly. After 1912, Chilembwe developed closer contacts with local independent African churches, including Seventh Day Baptist and Churches of Christ congregations, with the aim of uniting some or all of these African churches with his own mission church at the centre. Some of Chilembwe's congregation had formerly been Watchtower followers and he maintained contact with Elliot Kamwana, but the influence of Watchtower's millennial beliefs on him is minimised by most authors except the Lindens. Although the vast majority of those found guilty of rebellion and sentenced to death or to long terms of imprisonment were members of Chilembwe's church, a few other members of the Churches of Christ in Zomba were also found guilty.
Return to Nyasaland and mission work
In 1900 Chilembwe returned to Nyasaland, in his own words, "to labour amongst his benighted race". Backed financially by the National Baptist Convention of America, Inc., which also provided two American Baptist helpers until 1906, Chilembwe started his Providence Industrial Mission in Chiradzulu district. In its first decade, the mission developed slowly, assisted by regular small donations from his American backers, and Chilembwe founded several schools, which by 1912 had 1,000 pupils and 800 adult students.He preached the values of hard-work, self-respect and self-help to his congregation and, although as early as 1905 he used his church position to deplore the condition of Africans in the protectorate, he initially avoided specific criticism of the government that might be thought subversive. However, by 1912 or 1913, Chilembwe had become more politically militant and openly voiced criticism over the state of African land rights in the Shire Highlands and of the conditions of labour tenants there, particularly on the A. L. Bruce Estates.
It has also been claimed that Chilembwe preached a form of Millenarianism and that this may have influenced his decision to initiate an armed uprising in 1915. There is very little direct evidence of what Chilembwe did preach although, at least in his first decade in Nyasaland, his main message was of African advancement through Christianity and hard work. The evidence that has been interpreted as showing his millenarian views is dated from 1914 onward, when he began baptizing many new church members without their first receiving instruction, as was normal Baptist practice. However this evidence is ambiguous, and Chilembwe's activities have been more closely related to the Ethiopian movement of African churches breaking away, often with black American backing, from the more orthodox but European controlled Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist or other denominations, than being under the influence of overtly millenarian groups such as the Seventh-day Adventists.
Colonial grievances
In the Shire Highlands, the most densely populated part of the protectorate, European estates occupied about 867,000 acres, or over 350,000 hectares, almost half of the best arable land. Relatively few local Africans remained on the estates when the owners introduced labour rents, preferring to settle on Crown Land where customary law entitled them to use land belonging to the community, or to become migrant workers. However, planters with large areas of available land but limited labour could engage migrants from Mozambique on terms that Nyasaland Africans found unacceptable. These were called "Anguru", a convenient term with derogatory implications employed by Europeans to describe a number of different peoples who originated in Mozambique but had migrated into Nyasaland, mostly those speaking one of the Makua languages, often the Lomwe language, who themselves used various names to refer to their places of origin. They left Mozambique in significant numbers from 1899 when a harsh new labour code was introduced, and especially in 1912 and 1913 after a Mozambique famine in 1912. In 1912, the Colonial Office described them as working for such low wages as were "a record for any settled part of Africa". Many of those convicted after the rising were identified as "Anguru".Conditions on the estates where the "Anguru" became tenants were generally poor, and Africans both on estates and Crown Lands were subjected to an increase in Hut tax in 1912, despite food shortages. Chilembwe's Providence Industrial Mission was situated in an area dominated by the Magomero estate of A. L. Bruce Estates, named after a son-in-law of David Livingstone. From 1906, A. L. Bruce Estates developed and started to plant a hardy variety of cotton suitable for the Shire Highlands. Cotton required intensive labour over a long growing period, and the estate manager William Jervis Livingstone ensured that 5,000 workers were available on the Magomero estate throughout that five- or six-month period by exploiting the obligations of the migrant labour tenancy system called thangata. Alexander Livingstone Bruce, who controlled the A. L. Bruce Estates operations, instructed Livingstone
not to allow any mission work to be carried on or schools to be opened on the Bruce Estates, although the company provided free medical and hospital treatment for workers.
Alexander Livingstone Bruce held the considered view that educated Africans had no place in colonial society and he opposed their education. He also recorded his personal dislike for Chilembwe as an educated African; he considered all African-led churches were centres for agitation, and prohibited them being built on the Magomero estate. Although this prohibition applied to all missions, Chilembwe's mission was the closest; it became a natural focus for African agitation, and Chilembwe became the spokesman for African tenants on the Bruce Estates. Chilembwe provoked confrontation by erecting churches on estate land, which Livingstone burned down because he considered them as centres for agitation against the management and because they made potential claims on estate land.