John Chilembwe
John Chilembwe led a rising against British rule in Nyasaland in January 1915 that lasted a week and killed three Europeans, and is on Malawi's banknotes for it. He was born around 1871 near Chiradzulu, was taken up by Joseph Booth, an English Baptist radical who preached Africa for the Africans, and went with him to the United States in 1897, where he studied at a Black Baptist seminary in Virginia and read the history of a people who had been enslaved and had risen. He came home ordained in 1900, founded the Providence Industrial Mission at Chiradzulu, built a brick church with his own congregation's hands, and ran schools and a coffee farm on the model of Booker T. Washington. The grievances were those of the whole protectorate: the hut tax, the thangata labour rent the estates extracted, the floggings, and the settler next door, William Livingstone, who burned his congregation's churches. The war of 1914 was the last of them. Nyasaland's men were conscripted as carriers for the campaign against German East Africa, thousands died of it, and in November 1914 he wrote to the Nyasaland Times asking why Africans should die in a quarrel that was not theirs; the censor cut the letter and the government moved to deport him. On the night of 23 January 1915 his men attacked three estates, killed Livingstone and carried his head to the church, where Chilembwe preached the next morning with it on a pole; a second party attacked the armoury at Blantyre and took a few rifles. That was the rising. The hoped-for general revolt did not follow, the estates armed, and he was shot by African police on 3 February trying to reach Mozambique, at about forty-four. The church was blown up and the leaders hanged. Whether he meant to strike a blow and die, as one account has him saying, or expected to win, is not known; the commission of inquiry found the grievances real and changed nothing. Malawi made 15 January Chilembwe Day, and his face is the one on the kwacha.
- Lived: 1871 CE – 1915 CE
- Nationality: Malawian
- Roles: clergyman, insurgent
