The day for Africa is yet to come. Possibly the freedmen may be an agency in elevating their fatherland. David Livingstone.
John Chilembwe’s impending visit to the United States generated enormous interest among his friends, family and congregation. Booth had so emphasised the redeeming potential of black America that expectations were very high. Why Joseph Booth went to the personal expense (the expense for Chilembwe was not inconsiderable
His life was gentle, and the elements so mix’d in him that nature might stand up and say to all the world, ‘This was a man!’ – William Shakespeare Julius Caesar
With the plaintive note ‘Dear Mr. Booth, you please carry me for God. I like to be your cook boy’[1], John Chilembwe transitioned from the limited horizons of a Nyasaland native to a man of international perspective and white
The arrival on the lake of the British missionaries pitched the Portuguese on the coast into a fit of apprehension tinged with paranoia lest this be the vanguard of a concerted British strategy to rob them of their interests in the interior. Tensions between Lisbon and London had been steadily building since the days of Livingstone which had been amplified by the determined refusal of Portugal since the 1840s to implement any real practical measures to stamp out the slave trade in Africa.
With the withdrawal of the ill fated Universities Mission to Central Africa, a curtain of silence fell over the Lakes region behind which the work of the slave trade was left to proceed largely unmolested. Livingstone’s appeals against the trade had not gone unheard in Britain, but ten years would pass before he would be replaced as a British Consul in Moçambique, and twenty years more before the last line of captives would be
The road to development, peace and Christian enlightenment in Nyasaland, as it was in most other facets of British interface in Africa, was paved with good intentions. The original architect of that road was David Livingstone. No man had more profoundly noble intentions than he, but one of the many tragedies of the John Chilembwe affair was the fact that
The evening of the 23rd of January 1915 settled on the Shiré Highlands of the Nyasaland Protectorate without obvious mishap or portent. January, traditionally the wettest month of the year, could on occasions be drenched by upwards of 10 inches of rainfall, however, on this particular evening, the sky was sheer, the moon high and the stars clear and bright. The air was humid and still, the night warm. It was an African night. A chorus
One of the preliminary, and sometimes most unexpected lessons learned by the lay student of Southern African is the fact that the signature ‘Negro’ races of the region are not strictly indigenous. The primogenitors of most, in fact, arrived in the region in incremental waves over many centuries, beginning in the first millennium, in a mass movement that became known to later anthropologists as the Bantu Migrations.
