The Chilembwe uprising was a rebellion against British colonial rule in Nyasaland (modern-day Malawi) which took place in January 1915. It was led by John Chilembwe, an American-educated Baptist minister. Based around his church in the village of Mbombwe in the south-east of the colony, the leaders of the revolt were mainly from an emerging black middle class. They were motivated by grievances against the British colonial system, which included forced labour, racial discrimination and new demands imposed on the African population following the outbreak of World War I.
The revolt broke out in the evening of 23 January 1915 when rebels, incited by Chilembwe, attacked the headquarters of the A. L. Bruce Estates at Magomero and killed three white settlers. A largely unsuccessful attack on a weapons store in Blantyre followed during the night. By the morning of 24 January, the colonial authorities had mobilised the Nyasaland Volunteer Reserve (NVR) and called in regular troops from the King's African Rifles (KAR). After a failed attack by KAR troops on Mbombwe on 25 January, the rebels attacked a Christian mission at Nguludi and burned it down. The KAR and NVR captured Mbombwe without encountering any resistance on 26 January. Many of the rebels, including Chilembwe himself, fled towards Portuguese Mozambique, hoping to reach safety there, but many were captured. About 40 rebels were executed in the revolt's aftermath, and 300 were imprisoned; Chilembwe was shot dead by a police patrol near the border on 3 February.
Although the rebellion did not itself achieve success, it is commonly cited as a watershed moment in Malawian history. The rebellion had lasting effects on the British system of administration in Nyasaland, and some reforms were enacted in its aftermath. After World War II, the growing Malawian nationalist movement reignited interest in the Chilembwe revolt, and after the independence of Malawi in 1964 it became celebrated as a key moment in the nation's history. Chilembwe's memory, which remains prominent in the collective national consciousness, has often been invoked in symbolism and rhetoric by Malawian politicians. Today, the uprising is celebrated annually and Chilembwe himself is considered a national hero.
Background
British colonial rule in the region of modern-day Malawi, where the revolt occurred, began between 1899 and 1900, when the British sought to increase their formal control over the territory to preempt encroachment by the Portuguese or German colonial empires. The region became a British protectorate in 1891 as the British Central Africa Protectorate and in 1907 was named Nyasaland. Unlike many other parts of Africa, where British rule was dependent on the support of local factions, in Nyasaland British control rested on military superiority. During the 1890s the colonial authorities suppressed numerous rebellions by the local Yao, Ngoni and Chewa peoples.
British rule in Nyasaland radically altered the local indigenous power structures. The early colonial period saw some immigration and settlement by white colonists, who bought large swathes of territory from local chiefs, often for token payments in beads or guns. Most of the land acquired by white settlers, particularly in the Shire Highlands, was converted into plantations where tea, coffee, cotton and tobacco were grown. The enforcement of colonial institutions, such as the Hut Tax, compelled many indigenous people to find paid work and the demand for labour created by the plantations led to their becoming a major employer. Once employed on the plantations, black workers found that they were frequently beaten and subject to racial discrimination. Increasingly, the plantations were also forced to rely on a system, known locally as thangata, which at best involved exacting considerable labour as rent in kind and frequently degenerated into forced labour.
Chilembwe and his Church
John Chilembwe, born locally in around 1871, received his early education at a Church of Scotland mission and later met Joseph Booth, a radical Baptist missionary who ran the Zambezi Industrial Mission. Booth preached a form of egalitarianism and his progressive attitude towards race attracted Chilembwe's attention. Under Booth's patronage, Chilembwe travelled to the United States in 1897 for the purposes of higher education and to fundraise for Booth, beginning studies at the Virginia Theological Seminary in Lynchburg in 1898. There he mixed in African-American circles and was influenced by stories of the abolitionist John Brown and the egalitarianist Booker T. Washington.
Despite his Christian pacifist and visionary temperament, Booth was also highly critical of established institutions such as the colonial government and Protestant churches in Nyasaland. He was particularly hostile towards Church of Scotland missionaries in Blantyre, criticizing their affluent lifestyle in comparison to the poverty of local peasants. Both the colonial government and Presbyterian missionaries were concerned by Booth's "dangerous egalitarian spirit" and being "a determined advocate of racial equality, as well as being fundamentally opposed to the colonial state". Booth was also a staunch advocate of establishing his own industrial mission in addition to the religious one, and acquired 26,537 acres of land at Mitsidi with the help of Harry Johnston. Despite the fact that Booth was an avid anti-colonialist and Johnston a colonial advocate, both men were united by their disdain for the Church of Scotland, and Johnston was eager to aid Booth in order to undermine the efforts of Scottish missionaries. Booth's industrial missions were to be "self-managed by educated Africans, and to be largely focussed on agricultural and industrial production". The missions were to be self-supporting and managed by African themselves, with European settlers only serving as guides and advisors. Booth had profound influence on Chilembwe, and his egalitarian and proto-nationalist ideals shaped Chilembwe's own views as well as his Baptist faith.
Having managed to become a competition to other Protestant missionaries, Booth attracted many missionary-educated Africans away from the Presbyterians by offering them exorbitant wages - an African worker was paid 18 shillings a month by Booth, whereas the normal rate in the 1890s was only around three shillings. However, he paid his own African labourers in calico, worth only around two shillings, which was actually less than the salary offered by the rest of European settlers. He founded the African Christian Union, where he emphasized the need for Africans themselves to govern their economy, rather than have the European colonists "drain the wealth of Africa". His organisation had three goals, namely "to spread the Christian gospel throughout the African continent; to establish what he termed 'Industrial Missions'; and finally, to restore Africa to the African". He advocated for African self-government, and envisioned self-sustainable African economies managed by educated Africans, placing particular emphasis on the production of tea, coffee, cocoa and sugar, as well as mining and manufacturing. Anthropologist Brian Morris notes a significant contradiction in Booth's views that Chilembwe ended up inheriting, being a staunch egalitarianist while also calling for a hierarchical plantation economy and highly capitalist society. To this end, both Chilembwe and Booth were "the embodiment of the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism".
Chilembwe returned to Nyasaland in 1900 and, with the assistance of the African-American National Baptist Convention, he founded his independent church, the Providence Industrial Mission, in the village of Mbombwe. He was considered a "model of non-violent African advancement" by the colonial authorities during the mission's early years. He established a chain of independent black African schools, with over 900 pupils in total and founded the Natives' Industrial Union, a form of cooperative union that has been described as an "embryo chamber of commerce". Nevertheless, Chilembwe's activities led to friction with the managers of the A. L. Bruce Estates, who feared Chilembwe's influence over their workers. In November 1913, employees of the A. L. Bruce Estates burnt down churches that Chilembwe or his followers had built on estate land.
Information about Chilembwe's Church before the rebellion is scant, but his ideology proved popular and he developed a strong local following. For at least the first 12 years of his ministry, he preached ideas of African self-respect and advancement through education, hard work and personal responsibility, as advocated by Booker T. Washington, and he encouraged his followers to adopt European-style dress and habits. His activities were initially supported by white Protestant missionaries. The Mission's schools meanwhile began teaching racial equality, based on Christian teaching and anti-colonialism. Many of his leading followers, several of whom participated in the uprising, came from the local middle-class, who had similarly adopted European customs. Chilembwe's acceptance of European culture created an unorthodox anti-colonial ideology based around a form of nationalism, rather than a desire to restore the pre-colonial social order.
Following Booth's example, Chilembwe engaged not only in educational work and evangelism, but also attempted to establish his own agricultural estate. He employed local Lomwe labourers on his plots of coffee, rubber, pepper ad cotton. He won the respect of both fellow Africans and European landowners, and until 1914 "government officials and European missionaries alike regarded Chilembwe with some favour". He became the local leader of emerging African planters and entrepreneurs, particularly attracted to his own Protestant church congregation. It was during this time that Chilembwe started identifying with the discontent of both African classes - the Lomwe immigrants whom he employed, as well as emerging African entrepreneurs. Both African classes were highly alienated by the thangata system, which required every tenant to work for the estate owner in order to pay their rent and "hut tax". Labour rent was imposed during the brief rainy season, which forced Africans to work on their landowner's land while having no time to tend to their own at the critical time of the year. African tenants also had to follow strict regulations, and were prohibited from acquiring timber or hunting animals. In addition, European landowners would often force their tenants to work for far more than the system allowed for, beat their workers with a whip and forced African widows to work on the land too. Chilembwe acted as a spokesman for the local Lomwe people.
Meanwhile, the African planters were frustrated by economic restrictions and social discrimination that they had to endure despite adopting the European way of life. They were unable to obtain freehold land or credit and didn't have the right to sign the labour-tax certificates of their employees, which undermined their chances of attracting workers. Additionally, the colonial government openly favoured the white landowners, who acted like "feudal lords" on their own. Every African planter was "obliged to take off his hat for any European, whether government official or not", and a failure to do so often meant physical and verbal abuse. White settlers and even Protestant ministers, despite preaching equality, resented the African planters, as the fact that educated Africans embraced European fashion and expected to be treated equally was considered "above their station". William Jervis Livingstone was particularly known for using derogatory phrases towards educated and landowning Africans, asking "whose slave they are". Morris identifies this discrimination as one of the main causes for the rebellion.
After 1912, Chilembwe became more radical and began to predict the liberation of the Africans and the end of colonial rule, and began to foster closer links with a number of other independent African churches. From 1914, he preached more militant sermons, often referring to Old Testament themes, concentrating on such aspects as the Israelites' escape from slavery in Egypt , Chilembwe himself was not part of the apocalyptic Watch Tower movement, which was popular in central Africa at the time and later became known as Kitawala in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but some of his followers may have been influenced by it. The leader of Watch Tower, Charles Taze Russell had predicted that Armageddon would begin in October 1914, which some of Chilembwe's followers equated to an end to colonial rule.
World War I
World War I broke out in July 1914. By September 1914, the war had spread to Africa as British and Belgian forces began the East African campaign against the German colonial empire. In Nyasaland, the major effect of the war was massive recruitment of Africans to serve as porters in support of Allied troops. Porters lived in extremely poor conditions which left them exposed to disease and mortality rates among them during the campaigns were high. At the same time, the recruitment of porters created a shortage of labour which increased the economic pressures on Africans in Nyasaland. Millenarians at the time believed that World War I would be a form of Armageddon, which they believed would destroy the colonial powers and pave the way for the emergence of independent African states.
Chilembwe opposed the recruitment of the Nyasan people to fight what he considered to be a war totally unconnected to them. He promoted a form of Christian pacifism and argued that the lack of civil rights for Africans in the colonial system should exempt them from the duties of military service. In November 1914, following reports of large loss of life during fighting at Karonga, Chilembwe wrote a letter to The Nyasaland Times in Blantyre, explicitly appealing to the colonial authorities not to recruit black troops: