On 6 July 2017, Malawi will celebrate 53 years as an independent (sovereign) nation and 51 years as a Republic.
It has been a long ride, with numerous various difficulties, triumphs, and losses. However, one thing is certain, we are here and to our credit, have remained a peace-loving country, solid to preserve our identity.
As we prepare to pause and commemorate the day of gaining our freedom from the colonial master (Great Britain, now known as the United Kingdom), as a scholar of history, I find it is always refreshing to look back. This is “look back and take stock,” so that we may appreciate the present and better prepare for the future. What are we celebrating? How did we get here and what happened in the past?
This is a simple country-focus of this daughter of the soil of Malawi.
Reverend John Chilembwe, founder of the Providence Industrial Mission, is held in Malawi history chronicles as the first nationalists, who stood up to the evil treatment of the white colonial rulers and estate owners. The treatment was so bad that Chilembwe is recorded as taken some of the people’s grievances onto the pulpit uttering such words as “Africa for Africans.”
The first time I had about John Chilembwe, this hero of Nyasaland history and politics, was on March 3, 1974, Martyr’s Day. This was a day when the whole country was supposed to be sad, no drinking of alcohol, no dancing, no happiness of any kind. It was also a day when there was to be no work of any kind – if your baby had diarrhea the night before, there was to be no hanging of diapers (this was before the age of disposable nappies) on the clothes’ line.
It was a day to go to church, to mourn our beloved brothers and sisters that lost their lives so that we could be free. So out of respect, gratitude, and appreciation for their selfless heroes and heroines; people who lost their lives.
Onn this day, 3rd March, the national broadcaster, MBC took the day off. The staff took the day off in the sense that the entire day was spent broadcasting the John Chilembwe play, his life in Chiradzulu, his ties with Joseph Boothe, who took him to America and introduced him to the Rev. Dr. Lewis G Gordon, Foreign Missions Secretary of the National Baptist Convention. Gordon arranged for Chilembwe to attend the Virginia Theological Seminary and College, (now Virginia University of Lynchburg) and was later ordained as Baptist minister at Lynchburg in 1899.
The history books tell us about his influence of radical American Negro ideas and the works of John Brown, Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass. These are the influences that led the Reverend to become part of the uprising of 1915, when treatment of the Africans on estates such as the A L Bruce Estates, which was managed by William Jervis Livingstone.
The history of Chilembwe became well known there were times when even young children could be heard reciting the radio drama along with the MBC actors and actresses. The eloquent Life President Dr. H. Kamuzu Banda could also recount the John Chilembwe narrative for many hours, as was his fashion.
The Government under Dr. Banda was intent on Malawians embracing the formal narrative on Chilembwe that schools and colleges were encouraged to organize field trips to PIM. It was on such a day, that compelled by Chancol rules through a signed letter by the Registrar, that my friend Yakosa and Jane boarded a bus to PIM, to learn the history of the national hero John Chilembwe from the chroniclers in Chiradzulu.
The trip was a great boost for our African history class; so, we listened very attentively. As the narrative proceeded, the eloquent chronicler informed us something that still makes me laugh many years later. At the point, the legendary Childembwe was fleeing for his life, and his wife Ida crying the known line “I will go with you Joni…,” our story teller informed us that Chilembwe told “his people” that he is not their leader who will free them from the cruel white man.
He continued his story, and as college students, we were on our best behavior, absorbing the raw data on the Malawi hero in his home village; and probably from someone who may have been born in 1915. The tale was complete with the way the white settlers tricked Chilembwe into burning the bell his American Baptist friends had given him. The white settlers told Chilembwe, whose bell could be ringing in Chiradzulu and heard all the way in Zomba.
So Chilembwe burnt the bell, but it crumbled and never rang again.
The chronicler then said something that broke the group (there were three groups)
He said: “Another will come after me. You will know him because he will say “Kwacha! Kwacha! Kwacha!”
There was no hiding our laughter and how incredulously untrue this prophesy by Chilembwe. As college students, we were already skeptical of the yarn that was spewed by MBC and then cemented on the Presidential platform. But to be carted in an hour-long bus ride through the untarred dusty roads of Chiradzulu and fed royal lies, was too much. As such we did not get to hear the rest of the story because our chronicler, took offense at our laughter and said he would not tell us the rest of the great John Chilembwe story.
By the stage we were at, the great man was about to meet his fate in the fields of Chiradzulu-Mozambique boarder.
John Chilembwe is a great legend that Malawi has held onto. Before the uprising his life story has the appearance of the typical Shakespearean tragic hero. He rose to great heights, being spotted by Booth and taken to America where he had a college education and ordination; he met with members of the Negro race and saw first-hand the racial tension that he would also see in his own country.
The paradelles of Chilembwe’s actions (a church man turned political because of the people he serves in his church) resonate with other historic figures. Even the harsh treatment the British government dealt with the people they colonized: a few centuries before, they fought one of their colonies in a bloody because of endless taxes and harsh treatment through imposition of laws and more taxes (the Thirteen colonies that later became the United States of America).
The Chilembwe uprising, although led to the badly planned attempt to raid the Mandala warehouse for guns, had one major casualty; this was the death of William Jervis Livingstone, who was killed and beheaded. It is recorded that on January 24, Chilembwe conducted a service in the P.I.M. church next to a pole impaling Livingstone’s head.
Chilembwe was attacked on February 3, as he was running away from the authorities, who had planned to deport him to Mauritius.
Apart from establishing the PIM, Chilembwe also founded several schools, which by 1912 had 1,000 pupils and 800 adult students.
Chilembwe is celebrated through a national holiday on January 15; his bust is also found on Malawi’s currency.
Another paradelle in Chilembwe narrative is that of the second heroic freedom fighter, Dr. Banda, who also attended school among the Negroes in America. While Chilembwe was angered by the blood of African soldiers who died in World War One; Dr. Banda was a conscientious objector and would not be drafted to help in the World War Two. He too was incensed with Africans fighting in a war that had nothing to do with Africans.
The premise held by both Chilembwe and Banda, is woven in Malawi ethos. Another cause for celebration.
Long live genuine democracy!