Introduction

On the night of Saturday 23 January 1915 a party of armed men made their way the eight miles from Mbombwe near Chiradzulu, the headquarters of the Revd John Chilembwe's Providence Industrial Mission, to Magomero, the headquarters of the A.L. Bruce Estates. There they killed two Europeans, including the estate manager, William Jervis Livingstone. They then cut off his head and carried it back to Chiradzulu where it was displayed on a pole at the Sunday service conducted next day by Chilembwe. Livingstone's wife Katherine, two other European women and their children were escorted across the Phalombe plain towards Mbombwe before eventually being released unharmed. Meanwhile, a further contingent of men attacked the ALC headquarters at Mandala.

Within a fortnight the revolt had been suppressed. Three Europeans had died; two had been severely wounded, 36 convicted rebels had been executed, many others had been killed by the security forces. ‘For a rebellion against foreign rule, it had been, on the face of it, singularly ineffective’ noted Shepperson and Price in their authoritative account of the rising. Yet, as they also commented, the importance of the rising was far greater than its immediate, quantifiable, impact. A leading historian has claimed that this was the only significant rebellion in the whole of Africa to be inspired by Christianity prior to the First World War. It provided Malawi with its one unproblematic hero, John Chilembwe; his image is now depicted on Malawian bank notes.