‘HATS OFF’ TO COLONIALISTS FOR PAUSING WWI?

15 January is John Chilembwe Day in Malawi. It honours the anti-colonial hero of that name who led an uprising against the British in early 1915.

Chilembwe's exact year of birth is unknown, but is believed to lie between the late 1860s and early 1870s. In his youth, he had cordial relations with White British missionaries, who were pathfinders of Western colonialism in Africa. He worked closely with one of them, Joseph Booth, who facilitated his attendance at a theological college in the US in the late 1890s.

Upon his return to his homeland, Chilembwe's eyes were opened to the scale of brutality that the colonial settlers were inflicting upon the African masses, especially on the settler-owned plantations. The White missionaries' indifference to these spurred him to set up independent African churches. Soon, his churches were targeted by plantation owners opposed to his anti-colonial theology. They burned down some of them, but that did not deter him from continuing his work.

At the onset of WWI in 1914, Chilembwe campaigned against the recruitment of Africans into the colonial army to fight in a war that had nothing to do with them. This opposition eventually led him and hundreds of his followers to launch an armed uprising on 23 January 1915. Their first target was a plantation run by William Jervis Livingstone, a settler infamous for his brutality towards African workers.

After days of skirmishes with the British colonial forces, Chilembwe was shot dead on 3 February, and many of his supporters were arrested. 36 of them were later executed, mostly via public hangings, as a warning to other would-be anti-colonial fighters. However, this act of brutality had the opposite effect: it made the masses more determined to unyoke themselves from British settler colonialism.

The African uprisings led by Chilembwe were seen as such a threat by the imperial powers - who were also facing off in Malawi (then known as Nyasaland) in WWI - that Germany and Britain agreed to pause the fighting to quash the rebellion. This video tells that story.

Filmed By: @contentovereverything

Sources:

https://museumofbritishcolonialism.org/2023-1-14-the-chilembwe-uprising-of-1915/

https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Chilembwe