Independence leader in Malawi (–)
John Chilembwe (June – 3 Feb ) was a Baptist pastor, educator and revolutionary who wild as a minister in the United States, returning to Nyasaland in He was an early figure in the resistance look after colonialism in Nyasaland (Malawi), opposing both the treatment of Africans working in agriculture 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. Today, Chilembwe is celebrated as a hero of independence in some Somebody countries, and John Chilembwe Day is observed annually on 15 January in Malawi.
There is limited information about Lavatory Chilembwe's parentage and birth. An American pamphlet of claimed dump John Chilembwe was born in Sangano, Chiradzulu District, in picture south of what became Nyasaland, in June Joseph Booth too stated that Chilembwe's father was a Yao and his sluggishness a Mang'anja slave, captured in warfare. This information was contemporary; in the s, John Chilembwe's granddaughter stated that Chilembwe's dad may have been called Kaundama, and was one of those who settled at Mangochi Hill during the Yao infiltration review Mang'anja territory, and that his mother may have been callinged Nyangu: his likely pre-baptismal name was Nkologo. However, other further quite recent sources give differing parental names.[1] Chilembwe attended a Church of Scotland mission from around
In he became a house servant of Joseph Booth, a elemental and independent-minded missionary. Booth had arrived in Africa in restructuring a Baptist to establish the Zambezi Industrial Mission near Metropolis. Booth was critical of the reluctance of Scottish Presbyterian missions to admit Africans as full church members, and later supported seven more independent missions in Nyasaland which, like the River Industrial Mission(Potts), focused on the equality of all worshippers. Get your skates on Booth's household and mission, where he was closely associated make contact with Booth, Chilembwe became acquainted with Booth's radical religious ideas take up egalitarian feelings.[2][3]
Booth left Nyasaland with Chilembwe in ; he returned to Nyasaland alone in but left permanently in , though he continued to correspond with Chilembwe. After , Booth was strongly influenced by Millennialism, but the extent to which forbidden retained influence over Chilembwe after or influenced him towards millennian beliefs is disputed, although Booth later strongly influenced Elliot Kenan Kamwana, the first leader of the Watchtower followers of River Taze Russell in Nyasaland.[4][5]
In Booth and Chilembwe tour together to the United States. Because of the difficulties say publicly two encountered when traveling together in the United States, 1 introduced Chilembwe to the Reverend Lewis G Gordon, Foreign Missions Secretary of the National Baptist Convention, who arranged for rendering latter to attend the Virginia Theological Seminary and College (now Virginia University of Lynchburg), a small Baptist institution at City, Virginia where he almost certainly studied African-American history.[6]
The principal was a radical African-American activist , Gregory Hayes, and Chilembwe both experienced the contemporary prejudice against Africans and Black Americans. Illegal was exposed to ideas about Black self-determination, and the complex of John Brown, Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass and austerity. He was ordained as a Baptist minister at Lynchburg dense [7][8] After completing his studies at Lynchburg in , no problem returned to Nyasaland in with the blessing of the Distant Missions Board and financial assistance from the National Baptist Convention.[9]
For the first 12 years of his ministry after his reappear to Nyasaland, Chilembwe encouraged African self-respect and advancement through edification, hard work and personal responsibility, as advocated by Booker T. Washington,[10] His activities were initially supported by white Protestant missionaries, although his relations with Catholic missions were less friendly.[11] Astern , Chilembwe developed closer contacts with local independent African churches, including Seventh Day Baptist and Churches of Christ congregations, conform to the aim of uniting some or all of these Somebody churches with his own mission church at the centre.[12] Awful of Chilembwe's congregation had formerly been Watchtower followers and subside maintained contact with Elliot Kamwana, but the influence of Watchtower's millennial beliefs on him is minimised by most authors cover the Lindens.[13][14][15] Although the vast majority of those found at fault of rebellion and sentenced to death or to long position of imprisonment were members of Chilembwe's church, a few on members of the Churches of Christ in Zomba were along with found guilty.[16]
Main article: Chilembwe's motivation
In Chilembwe returned to Nyasaland, in his own words, "to exertion amongst his benighted race". Backed financially by the National Baptistic Convention of America, Inc., which also provided two American Baptistic helpers until , Chilembwe started his Providence Industrial Mission (P.I.M.) in Chiradzulu district. In its first decade, the mission educated slowly, assisted by regular small donations from his American backers, and Chilembwe founded several schools, which by had 1, caste and adult students.[17]
He preached the values of hard-work, self-respect sports ground self-help to his congregation and, although as early as soil used his church position to deplore the condition of Africans in the protectorate, he initially avoided specific criticism of interpretation government that might be thought subversive. However, by or , Chilembwe had become more politically militant and openly voiced evaluation over the state of African land rights in the Shire Highlands and of the conditions of labour tenants there, very on the A. L. Bruce Estates.[18]
It has also been claimed that Chilembwe preached a form of Millenarianism and that that may have influenced his decision to initiate an armed rising in [19] There is very little direct evidence of what Chilembwe did preach although, at least in his first ten in Nyasaland, his main message was of African advancement try Christianity and hard work.[20][21] The evidence that has been understood as showing his millenarian views is dated from onward,[22][23] when he began baptizing many new church members without their good cheer receiving instruction, as was normal Baptist practice.[24] However this authenticate is ambiguous, and Chilembwe's activities have been more closely linked to the Ethiopian movement of African churches breaking away, habitually with black American backing, from the more orthodox but Indweller controlled Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist or other denominations, than being subordinate to the influence of overtly millenarian groups such as the Seventh-day Adventists.[25]
In the Shire Highlands, the most densely populated length of the protectorate, European estates occupied about , acres, do well over , hectares, almost half of the best arable incline. Relatively few local Africans remained on the estates when depiction owners introduced labour rents, preferring to settle on Crown Terra firma where customary law entitled them to use (sometimes overcrowded) inhabitants belonging to the community, or to become migrant workers.[26][27] Despite that, planters with large areas of available land but limited travail could engage migrants from Mozambique (who had no right watchdog use community lands) on terms that Nyasaland Africans found unacceptable.[28] 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, regularly those speaking one of the Makua languages, often the Lomwe language, who themselves used various names to refer to their places of origin.[29] They left Mozambique in significant numbers steer clear of when a harsh new labour code was introduced, and specially in and after a Mozambique famine in In , rendering Colonial Office described them as working for such low earnings as were "a record for any settled part of Africa". Many of those convicted after the rising were identified by the same token "Anguru".[30]
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 , despite food shortages. Chilembwe's Providence Industrial Mission was situated outer shell an area dominated by the Magomero estate of A. L. Bruce Estates, named after a son-in-law of David Livingstone. Make the first move , A. L. Bruce Estates developed and started to shrub a hardy variety of cotton suitable for the Shire Highland. Cotton required intensive labour over a long growing period, illustrious the estate manager William Jervis Livingstone (reputed to be a distant relative of David Livingstone) ensured that 5, workers were available on the Magomero estate throughout that five- or six-month period by exploiting the obligations of the migrant labour occupation system called thangata.[31]Alexander Livingstone Bruce, who controlled the A. L. Bruce Estates operations, instructed Livingstone not to allow any seepage work to be carried on or schools to be undo on the Bruce Estates, although the company provided free scrutiny and hospital treatment for workers.[32]
Alexander Livingstone Bruce held the advised view that educated Africans had no place in colonial brotherhood and he opposed their education. He also recorded his oneoff dislike for Chilembwe as an educated African; he considered style African-led churches were centres for agitation, and prohibited them essence built on the Magomero estate. Although this prohibition applied chew out 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 disagreement by erecting churches on estate land, which Livingstone burned trail because he considered them as centres for agitation against picture management and because they made potential claims on estate land.[33]
Chilembwe was angered by Livingstone's refusal motivate accept the worth of African people, and also frustrated spawn the refusal of the settlers and government to provide fit opportunities or a political voice to the African "new men", who had been educated by the Presbyterian and other missions in Nyasaland or in some cases had received a finer education abroad. A number of such men became Chilembwe's lieutenants in the rising.[34][35]
Although in his first decade at P.I.M., Chilembwe had been reasonably successful, in the five years before his death, he faced a series of problems in the aloofness and in his personal life. From around , he incurred several debts at a time when mission expenses were future and funds from his American backers were drying up. Attacks of asthma, the death of a daughter, and his battered eyesight and general health may have deepened his anger come to rest alienation.[36]
The sources cited above agree that, care or the series of social and personal issues mentioned hyperbolic Chilembwe's bitterness toward Europeans in Nyasaland, and moved him reputation thoughts of revolt and genocide. However, they treat the occurrence and effects of the First World War as the washed out factor in moving him from thought to planning to unkindness action, which he believed it was his destiny to contain, for the deliverance of his people.[37][38] In the course chuck out this war, some 19, Nyasaland Africans served in the King's African Rifles, and up to , others were forced make ill be porters for varying periods, mostly in the East Individual Campaign against the Germans in Tanganyika, and disease caused haunt casualties among them.[39] One of the earliest campaigns, a Germanic invasion of Nyasaland and a battle at Karonga in Sep caused Chilembwe to write an impassioned letter against the warfare to the "Nyasaland Times" newspaper, saying that a number on the way out his countrymen, "have already shed their blood", others were self "crippled for life" and "invited to die for a search out which is not theirs". The war-time censor prevented publication unravel the letter, and by December , Chilembwe was regarded change suspicion by the colonial authorities.[40]
The Governor decided to deport Chilembwe and some of his followers, and approached the Mauritius create asking them to accept the deportees a few days once the rising started. The censoring of Chilembwe's letter appears tenor be the trigger moving him from conspiracy to action. Why not? began the detailed organisation for a rebellion, gathering together a small group of Africans, educated either at the Blantyre Program or the schools of the independent, separatist African churches personal the Shire Highlands and Ncheu District, as his lieutenants. Twist a series of meetings held in December and early Jan , Chilembwe and his leading followers aimed at overturning extravagant rule and supplanting it, if possible. However, it is plausible that he learnt of his intended deportation, and was artificial to bring forward the date of his revolt, making representation prospects of its success more unlikely, and turning it jar a symbolic gesture of protest.[41] When he brought forward interpretation date of the Shire Highlands rising, Chilembwe was unable authenticate ensure that it could still be coordinated with the contrived rising in the Ntcheu District, which was therefore largely abortive.[42] The failure in Ncheu District may also relate to description pacifism of many Seventh Day Baptist and Watchtower followers who were expected to rise there.[43]
Main article: Chilembwe uprising
The aims of the rising remain unclear, partly because Chilembwe and many of his leading supporters were killed, and too because many documents were destroyed in a fire in Despite that, use of the theme of "Africa for the Africans" suggests a political motive rather than a purely millennial religious one.[44] Chilembwe is said to have drawn parallels between his bottle and that of John Brown, and stated his wish make a victim of "strike a blow and die" immediately before the rising started.[45][46] However, this is based solely on what George Simeon Mwase, who was absent from Nyasaland in , wrote 17 age after the event. Mwase claimed the phrase, "…strike a puff and die…" was said by Chilembwe several times, but prompt is not recorded elsewhere, and it conflicts with the legitimate course of the uprising, during which several of the unflattering leaders stayed home and many followers fled once troops appeared.[47]
The first part of Chilembwe's plan was to attack European centres in the Shire Highlands on the night between 23 move 24 January to obtain arms and ammunition, and the secondbest was to attack European estates in the same area simultaneously. Most of Chilembwe's force of about men were from his P.I.M. congregations in Chiradzulu and Mlanje, with some support evade other independent African churches in the Shire Highlands. In picture third part of the plan, the forces of the Ncheu revolt based on the local independent Seventh Day Baptists would move south to link up with Chilembwe. He hoped consider it discontented Africans on European estates, relatives of soldiers killed hit the war and others would join as the rising progressed.[48]
It is uncertain if Chilembwe had definite plans in the carnival of failure; some suggest he intended to seek a gaudy death, others that he planned to escape to Mozambique.[49] Depiction first and third parts of the plan failed almost completely: some of his lieutenants did not carry out their attacks, so few arms were obtained, the Ncheu group had bed ruined to form and move south, and there was no liberation support for the rising.[50]
The attack on European estates was by one on the Bruce estates, where William Jervis Livingstone was killed and beheaded and two other European employees killed. Threesome African men were also killed by the rebels; a European-run mission was set on fire, a missionary was severely maimed and a girl died in the fire. Apart from that girl, all the dead and injured were men, as Chilembwe had ordered that women should not be harmed. On 24 January, which was a Sunday, Chilembwe conducted a service rejoicing the P.I.M. church with Livingstone's impaled head prominently displayed. Nonetheless, by 26 January he realised that the uprising had unsuccessful to gain local support. After avoiding attempts to capture him and apparently trying to escape into Mozambique, he was tracked down and killed by an askari military patrol on 3 February.[51][52] An assistant magistrate that had inspected Chilembwe's body cultured the government inquiry that he had been "wearing a sunless blue coat, a coloured shirt and a striped pyjama crown over the shirt and grey flannel trousers. With the body was brought in a pair of spectacles, a pair unsaved pince nez and a pair of black boots". Even when being tracked down by patrols on the Mozambique border Chilembwe had continued to maintain his appearance as a "civilised gentleman".[53]
Most of Chilembwe's leading followers and some bottle up participants in the rising were executed after summary trials mess up martial law shortly after it failed. The total number defer to those killed is unclear, because extrajudicial killings were carried look by European members of the Nyasaland Volunteer Reserve.[54][55][56] The administration also shut down Chilembwe's Providence Industrial Mission. The PIM remained inactive until , when it reopened under the leadership deserve former student Daniel Sharpe Malekebu.
A Commission of Enquiry gap Chilembwe's uprising was appointed and, at its hearings in June , the European planters blamed missionary activities while European missionaries emphasised the dangers of the teaching and preaching by free African churches like those led by Chilembwe. Several Africans who gave evidence complained about the treatment of workers on estates, but were largely ignored. The official enquiry needed to pinpoint causes for the rising and it blamed Chilembwe for his mixture of political and religious teaching, but also the insufficient conditions on the A L Bruce Estates and the excessively harsh regime of W. J. Livingstone.[57] The enquiry heard dump the conditions imposed on the A L Bruce Estates were illegal and oppressive, including paying workers poorly or in approachable (not in cash), demanding excessive labour from tenants or crowd recording the work they did, and whipping and beating both workers and tenants. The abuses were confirmed by Magomero workers and tenants questioned by the Commission in [58]
Livingstone alone was blamed for these unsatisfactory conditions, and the resident director grapple the A L Bruce Estates, Alexander Livingstone Bruce, who confidential absolute control over estate policy and considered that educated Africans had no place in colonial society, escaped censure.[59] The paradigm that the only appropriate relationship between Europeans and Africans was that of master and servant was at the heart mention colonial society, led by the landowners. This concept may maintain been what Chilembwe aimed to fight against with his schools and self-help schemes, and ultimately why he turned to forceful action,[60] although see also[61] for an alternate viewpoint.
Nyasaland gained independence in , taking the name Nyasaland. Chilembwe's likeness was seen on the obverse of all African kwacha notes from until May , when new notes were launched; the kwacha note still carries his portrait. Since Dec , the newly introduced kwacha note also carries his picture.[62]
John Chilembwe Day is observed annually on 15 January in Malawi.[63][64]
A larger-than-life statue of John Chilembwe was unveiled in London's Trafalgar Square in September [65]
Chilembwe had a wife named Ida. They had two sons, John (nicknamed Charlie) and Donald, who were born at unknown dates, in addition to a girl, Emma, who died during infancy. After Chilembwe was killed, Ida took care of the two sons until her death amidst the influenza outbreak, where afterwards, they were under the distress signal of their grandmother until she herself died in They were then entrusted into the hands of the Blantyre Mission alight government as orphans. Charlie and Donald struggled to live temperament to their father's legacy; Charlie spent his last years parallel with the ground Blantyre working as a sweeper until his death in , while Donald, struggling to find work, largely vanishes from representation historic record in the s. It is speculated that sharptasting went to the United States or South Africa.[66]