Harvey Kwiyani tells the story of a legendary figure in the resistance of colonialism, who had had a multi-faceted impact on Malawi and beyond, and whose statue now stands on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square.

by Harvey Kwiyani

20 August 2024

John Chilembwe is a legendary figure in Malawi. He was the subject of a conference earlier this year in Cambridge, and is the subject of Samson Kambalu’s sculpture Antelope (the meaning of Chilembwe) which is the current occupant of the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square.

Who was John Chilembwe?

Born in 1871 of Yao heritage, in 1892 Chilembwe became a servant of Joseph Booth, a British Baptist missionary from Derby who had just come to Malawi (via New Zealand and Australia).

That year Booth set up what he called the Zambezi Industrial Mission, right at the beginning of the British colonisation of the piece of land that they later called Nyasaland (and became Malawi after independence in 1964).

These first years of the process of colonisation usually entailed what was called the pacification of the people of the land – the elimination of all who would resist colonial subjugation. Malawi was no different.

A rebellious missionary

Booth came to Malawi when the pacification was just beginning and he immediately took the side of the Africans. In 1897, he published his manifesto, entitled “Africa for the Africans,” in which he pleaded with the British Crown to cede all African land back to Africans and to treat them as equals.

Of course, he was declared an enemy of the colonial enterprise and was deported by the British from Malawi in 1900. They kept deporting him from the other places he went to: by the time he came back to England in 1915, he had been deported by the British government more than five times (from different parts of South Africa and Botswana).

In 1897, Booth brought Chilembwe to Virginia in the United States, where he trained for the ministry until 1900.

Mission pioneers

When he returned to Malawi, having been ordained a Baptist pastor and established relationships with some African American leaders who would support his ministry for a long time, Chilembwe immediately established his own mission station. The Providence Industrial Mission, at Mbombwe Hill, was based just a few miles south over the Chiradzulu Hill from where my own great-great-grandfather, Mr Nacho, led the Chiradzulu Mission (a station of the Blantyre Mission that had been set up by the Church of Scotland).

All this was happening just a few more miles from Magomero, which had become the first British mission station in the region in 1861, when David Livingstone made it the homebase of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa.

Colonial terror

By 1892, when Joseph Booth came to Malawi, David Livingstone’s daughter, Agnes, and her husband, Alexander Low Bruce (who never visited the country), had just purchased a huge piece of land at the old mission station at Magomero. Agnes put a cousin, William J Livingstone, in charge of what they named the AL Bruce Estates.

For most of his time at Magomero, William did not allow schools and churches on or close to the farm – educated Africans would be difficult to control. He also took full advantage of the colonial government’s tactics to force local people around the estate to provide him with free labour (for one week in each month).

Naturally, locals found William Livingstone quite difficult to live with.

Together with Agnes’ son, Alexander Livingstone Bruce (who came to Malawi in 1908), William unleashed terror onto the neighbours, often using physical violence to force people to work on the estate and burning down any schools and churches that emerged around the estate.

To strike a blow and die

As a result, fed up especially of the humiliation connected to the pacification of Malawi and incensed about the conscription of many young Malawians to fight against the Germans in Tanzania (which was German East Africa at the time), Chilembwe and others decided to rise up against the British colonial government and its settler farmers saying, “We need to strike a blow and die, maybe this time our blood will amount to something.”

William Livingstone at Magomero was an archenemy and special target. He was killed on 23 January 1915.

Chilembwe himself was killed on 3 February as the British government jailed and killed many Malawians in an effort to quell the uprising. The colonial government deported many Western missionaries who could, even remotely, be connected to Chilembwe.

A new law was established that required all churches registered in Malawi to have a white leader. This law was still in place in 1964 when Malawi gained its independence from Britain.

All in all, when it comes to the history of mission and Christianity in Malawi, a history dominated by names of Western missionaries, Chilembwe stands as a legendary figure. His story is not only of the church and mission but also a local Christian leader’s struggle for freedom in the context of colonialism.

The role played by the British colonial government and the Livingstones shows exactly how mission and colonialism worked hand in hand. It is for stories like these that we believe that it is time to decolonise mission.

Dr Harvey Kwiyani leads the African Christianity programme at CMS Pioneer Mission Training as wells as the Acts 11 Project, a new centre for global witness and human migration.

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We celebrate a devoted life of service to God and to Church Mission Society as Rt Rev Harry Moore turns 100 on 2 November 2023.

A very happy hundredth birthday to Bishop Harry Moore, who was part of the leadership of CMS over many years, including leading the society as general secretary (CEO) from 1986 to 1990.

A life in mission

Born in 1923, Harry served as a CMS mission partner in Masjed Suleiman, Iran from 1957 to 1960. He was CMS Home Secretary from 1974 to 1980 and Executive Secretary from 1980 to 1983 before becoming the second bishop of Cyprus and the Gulf in 1983.

In 1986, Harry’s predecessor as general secretary, Simon Barrington-Ward, left to become Bishop of Coventry. The then president, David Bleakley, persuaded Harry to return to CMS to ‘steady the ship’ during a tough period.

The London base at Partnership House was being refurbished so a third of staff were based with USPG in Tufton Street. The society was facing a million pound deficit, and the Finance, Personnel and Communications Secretaries had all retired and new people were in post.

“He did what was needed,” says long-serving CMS mission partner and staff member Philip Bingham.

Philip vividly remembers a semon he heard Harry preach in Cambridge, before Philip was involved with CMS:

“He spoke from Isaiah 40:

“’Those who wait for the Lord will renew their strength. They shall rise up with wings like eagles. They shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.’

“At one point, he said that some mission agencies focus on short-term mission – on those ‘who shall run and not be weary’, and acknowledged that was their calling. Then he said, ‘At CMS we are looking for people who will walk and walk and walk, and not faint.’

“We still are.”

A call to the edges

CMS today is committed to helping people become disciples of Jesus “at the edges” – the edges of church, of our society and of our comfort zones. Bishop Harry’s first editorial as general secretary in a 1986 edition of the CMS magazine expresses a striking similar idea; though he uses the language of “crossing frontiers”.

“We are all called to discover the frontiers of mission around us right where we are”

Harry Moore (pictured during a visit to CMS in 2015)

It’s stirring stuff – and still worth reading – so we re-publish an extract below:

You are invited

When my appointment as general secretary was announced, one old and valued friend wrote to me of the urgency for CMS “to get its act together as a voluntary society working on the frontiers of the Church.”

Wherever CMS has made a real, appropriate and constructive contribution to the life of the Church (and it has done so in its long history) it has been working on the frontiers.

In the early days, geographical frontiers tested us. Today there are other frontiers of mission waiting to be crossed, (and my friend was right – there is some urgency in the matter).

[…]

Therefore, we are all called to discover the frontiers of mission around us right where we are and to give ourselves wholeheartedly to crossing those frontiers with Christ.

It is a daunting but exciting prospect and God does not waste his servants’ time. He has something for each one to do.

If one is called to the frontiers of prayer, let prayer be deep and costly. Let frontiers be crossed.

If another is called to the frontiers of our multi-faith society, let there be sustained effort to meet, understand and relate to people of other faiths. Let frontiers be crossed.

If yet another is called to go with Jesus across frontiers of political and economic life, let there be depth and perseverance in the search for God’s will. Let frontiers be crossed.

Let every member of CMS hear this call. Use the Society’s network for support and for sharing insights and experiences of God’s grace, that we may all benefit from what is done.

There is, before us, an immense opportunity in the service of our Lord as we hear the call to cross the frontiers of mission. The response to that call will take some far from Britain – there are still many ways in which service can be given; the response to that call will bring others to Britain to serve with the church here; but for most of us, our response to that call will bring us to the frontiers of mission right where we are.

I invite you in the name of the Lord to join us in a new phase of pressing on the frontiers of mission. The cost may be considerable, but the reward will be great, for at the frontiers we shall surely meet Jesus afresh.

Harry Moore

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In 1851, a group of British missionaries starved to death at the southernmost tip of South America without having shared the gospel. So why would a group of CMS people in mission working across Latin America choose this location for a gathering? CMS personnel lead for Latin America Jo Anthony reflects on mission past and present.

It wasn’t a promising start to mission work – Captain Allen Gardiner and his six colleagues had felt called to take the gospel to the Fuegian indigenous peoples at the very “end of the earth”. However, fierce weather, isolation and a series of errors led to disease and death, and the whole party perished within a few months. Despite these beginnings, it was from this endeavour near the modern-day town of Ushuaia in Argentina that the Patagonian Missionary Society (later the South American Mission Society (SAMS), now part of Church Mission Society) was formed.

Indigenous focus

These first missionaries were followed by others from the Patagonian Missionary Society, who connected with the Yaghan people by bringing small groups of them to the Falkland Islands, where the missionaries were initially based. However, the missionaries’ first attempts to settle in Tierra del Fuego (islands at the southern tip of South America) resulted in eight of them being killed by Yaghan people in 1859. But in spite of this harrowing setback, the mission continued and relationships improved. Bishop Waite Stirling established a mission station in 1869 that effectively founded the city of Ushuaia. And one of the first missionaries to live among the Yaghan people, Thomas Bridges, learned their language and put together a grammar and dictionary. He and his family settled in Ushuaia at the mission station, where he lived for more than 20 years.

Yet as the area attracted more settlers from further north because of a gold rush and a boom in sheep farming, the indigenous groups came into conflict with the European way of life and were exposed to new diseases. The population was devastated and eventually mission endeavours among them came to an end. But that wasn’t quite the end of the story….

For nearly two centuries, indigenous groups have been a focus for SAMS and later CMS. While these peoples were often marginalised by many of those of European descent and experienced an almost unimaginable loss of lands and traditions, SAMS people in mission have walked alongside them through providing access to education, preaching the gospel, translating the Bible and teaching resources, equipping leaders and campaigning alongside indigenous groups for land rights.

The CMS group who visited Ushuaia included indigenous bishops Mateo Alto and Crisanto Rojas from the Diocese of Northern Argentina, where there are now more than 150 churches with around 15,000 members in total.

Coming full circle

As we discussed holding our first ever in-region conference of all CMS’s people in mission currently based in Latin America last year, someone suggested we meet near to where SAMS began. So, we arrived in the beautiful town of Ushuaia on 2 January 2023, to talk, listen, pray together and seek God’s will for our work, ministries and lives in Latin America and beyond.

We all knew that there was historic significance to the stunning surroundings, but we hadn’t necessarily anticipated the warm welcome we would receive from a local church community. While there are no Anglican churches or CMS work currently in Ushuaia, the pastor of the local evangelical church of El Gran Rey in the town centre was invited to our conference. He delivered a very moving account of the history of SAMS.

It was humbling and inspiring to see that he knew more about SAMS’s beginnings than most, if not all, of us who work and volunteer for CMS. He told us that he and his congregation felt much gratitude towards those first pioneers who went to the edge of the world to share the gospel, in what was then considered a difficult and inhospitable place.

Later, we visited a midweek church service at El Gran Rey and spent time sharing testimonies with each other of God’s work across Ushuaia and across Latin America. During the church service, congregation members and some of our own group had tears in their eyes as the pastor again spoke about those first missionaries who came to try to share Jesus with the Yaghan people. The church presented our group with a painting of Allen Gardiner and Ushuaia by congregation member Mónica Kizur, which is now in CMS House in Oxford.

Take part

Take part Keen to hear more about CMS’s work in Latin America? Save the date on 23 September 2023 for Adelante, the CMS conference exploring mission in Latin America.

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Church Mission Society integrated with the South American Mission Society in February 2010. Here we celebrate the inspirational founder of the mission society that became SAMS: Captain Allen Gardiner RN.

6 September is Allen Gardiner Day in the Anglican calendar in honour of the man who founded what became the South American Mission Society (SAMS) and who sacrificed his life as one of its first missionaries.

From a Christian upbringing in Berkshire, his embarking on a naval career and the death of his mother led him to turn away from his faith. But on a voyage to Cape Town, Ceylon, India, Malaysia and China, a spiritual crisis resulted in his emphatic conversion to Jesus Christ.

He yearned to share Christ on his travels. After leaving the navy and suffering the death of his wife, Julia, he set out to evangelise Zulus in South Africa and became the founder of Christianity in Natal. He was an integral part of the meeting at which Durban was proclaimed a town and a plaque records how he laid out and named the town after the then Governor of the Cape.

Wherever he went, Gardiner faced opposition from the authorities, secular and religious. With his second wife Elizabeth he began to focus on South America but his desire to share Christ with Chilean Mapuches – which included a family journey of 1,000 miles overland by pack mule from Buenos Aires to Santiago and Concepción – again met with hostility. In 1842 he made his base in the Falklands and contacted Patagonian Indians. This led to the formation of the Patagonian Missionary Society two years later after other societies, including CMS, were unable to agree to his request to take responsibility for this new ministry.

Another unsuccessful mission followed, this time to Bolivian Indians of the Gran Chaco, so the indomitable Gardiner turned back to Patagonia and spearheaded a bold but tragic attempt in 1850 to 51 to evangelise the Indians of Tierra del Fuego. Six men, including three Cornish fishermen, accompanied him, but fierce weather, Indian hostility, and a series of errors and logistical problems led to disease and death on the island.

Gardiner’s journal, water-damaged but readable, was found in his hand the following year by the crew of HMS Dido, and includes the plea to God, “Let not this mission fail”, and this prayer:

The diary is now in the Church Mission Society archives. The work of the Society in the subsequent 160 years and the growth of the Anglican Churches of South America are God’s answer to the prayer. Gardiner had many failures in his life, but his solid, resolute faith is an inspiration and he merits his place in the Anglican calendar as one of the heroes of God’s kingdom.

Many biographies of Gardiner have been written. The first by his brother-in-law, John Marsh, was published in 1857; the next, by Marsh and Waite Stirling, Bishop of the Falkland Islands, appeared in 1867. The sixth edition of this work (1883) is on the Project Canterbury website.

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Today, 23 August, is the UN’s International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition. Cathy Ross reflects on the realities of the slave trade and her own discipleship through the lens of an ex-slave trader who is part of the fabric of CMS.

John Newton is best known for his hymn Amazing Grace, written 250 years ago. I attended an event to celebrate this back in July at the church where he had been the curate.

My knowledge of John Newton was sketchy – slave ship captain who converted to Christianity who wrote this well known hymn; member of the Eclectic Society that led to the founding of CMS way back in 1799.

So I was shocked to learn that after his conversion (as a result of a shipwreck) he continued to invest in the slave trade! I had imagined that once he was converted he would immediately see the evils of the slave trade, repent and change his ways. But it was several years before he did so. 

He said, “custom, example and interest had blinded my eyes”. 

Ouch! That got me thinking where has custom, example and interest blinded my eyes? Any ideas?

Well, an obvious example, and perhaps even more obvious after this summer, is climate change and global warming. How much have I really changed my lifestyle to protect our beautiful planet? Am I willing to forgo overseas holidays and travel by car, not eat meat, consume less, waste less water; or to be honest has custom, example and interest blinded my eyes? Perhaps my discipleship is not unlike Newton’s?

I also learned that Newton’s ships transported 468 slaves. Or rather “enslaved persons” as the 1619 project explains so compellingly. The 1619 project describes a new American origins story beginning in August 1619 (rather than 4 July 1776 with the American War of Independence) when a ship arrives in Virginia carrying a cargo of 20 to 30 enslaved people from Africa.

They state that the term ‘enslaved person’ more accurately conveys the reality of being a slave without stripping them of their personhood or humanity.

I did not know that Newton’s ships had transported 468 enslaved persons. Nor do I know their names. They are 468 of the roughly 12.5 million enslaved persons who were transported in the Middle Passage.

Prof Anthony Reddie, Director of the Oxford Centre for Religion and Culture at Regent’s Park College in Oxford, spoke at this event and he began his presentation in the afternoon by telling us he was not really interested in John Newton. A provocative opening for a celebration dedicated to celebrating John Newton! 

No, Anthony was more interested in the nameless 468 enslaved persons who had been transported by Newton. Fair enough, I thought. This is the history we need to hear. The history that reminds us that our government borrowed the equivalent of 40 per cent of the Treasury’s annual income to compensate the owners of enslaved persons (not the enslaved persons themselves!) when they were freed, and that this was only paid off in 2015! 2015! How is this possible? So descendants of enslaved persons have been helping to pay off their owners? Is the world mad? When we see the profits energy companies are making, yes I think so. The system is broken. 

What are we going to do about it? I felt simultaneously encouraged and enraged that John Newton took years to see the evils of the slave trade after his conversion. Encouraged that he did eventually see; enraged that it took him so long. Maybe this is a kind of slow burn discipleship. 

But at least he did see it and then he did something – he became an abolitionist. What are the issues I need to face and do something about? I could name many -isms – I think you know the drill. 

But let’s get close and personal. What injustices do I see near me? Whose names do I not know? Whose voices am I unaware of? How slow a burn is my discipleship?

Dr Cathy Ross is leader of CMS Pioneer Mission Training Oxford.

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2019 is a significant year for South American Christians, writes Nick Drayson, CMS mission partner and the Bishop of Northern Argentina.

The new year marks the 150th anniversary of two key events: the founding of the first successful Anglican mission on what would become Argentine soil, and the consecration of the first bishop. Both of these landmarks are associated with one remarkable man: Waite Hockin Stirling.

“As I pace up and down at evening before my hut, I fancy myself a sentinel – God’s sentinel, I trust – stationed at the southernmost outpost of His great army. A dim torch of heaven surprises the heart with joy, and I forget my loneliness in realising the privilege of being permitted to stand here in Christ’s name.”

Stirling’s diary, January 1869

These stark words, written in Ushuaia, evoke the striking image of a man patrolling the shore of a sheltered bay at the bottom of South America, and contemplating the move he has made for the sake of the gospel – to establish a base for mission among the same tribes who had caused the death of several of his colleagues only a few months and years earlier.

“This day week the (schooner) ‘Allen Gardiner’ left Ushuaia, and I have, with God’s mercy, passed in safety and comfort a Sunday in these secluded parts. My nearest countrymen are probably careering in gallant ships over the billows of Cape Horn.”

He had indeed had the relief of presiding over a church service with the Yahgans, which, in a short time would become the basis of a flourishing work of mission and education in the tribes of the area. At the time it must have seemed a lonely and distant goal.

It was now 22 years since, as an undergraduate at Oxford, he had heard Captain Allen Gardiner – who would die on these shores in 1851 – issue a missionary challenge and this had remained with him. It had led him to offer his services as general secretary of the Patagonian Mission – soon to become SAMS (the South American Missionary Society). And it had led him to follow his predecessor in the role, the Rev George Pakenham Despard, to the “uttermost parts of the earth” where he now stood.

Based on the Falklands from 1863, he at first worked tirelessly with friendly Yahgans, including the relatives of those who had so recently massacred the crew of the ship that had taken another missionary to Tierra del Fuego. Alongside him was Thomas Bridges, Despard’s adopted son, who was fast becoming fluent in Yahgan.

But he soon became convinced that the only way to establish enough trust to extend the gospel among these people was to live among them. And so he set up his house in the sheltered bay of Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, and entrusted himself to God, and to those Yahgan friends who were prepared to go with him.

His character and confidence won through, and the way was opened for others to follow, the first being Thomas Bridges and John Lawrence. Stirling stayed for seven months before being recalled to London, where, in December 1869, he was consecrated the first bishop of the Falklands, with responsibility for the whole of the South American continent south of the Guyanas!

Bridges’ son-in-law Wilfrid Barbrooke Grubb was soon to become the pioneer missionary to the Chaco regions of Paraguay and Argentina, and Allen Gardiner’s son and grandson helped open up the mission field in the South of Chile. The English chaplaincies out of which the existing dioceses in several major cities in the continent have grown also benefited from Stirling’s ministry.

For the next 30 years he established openings for the gospel and pastoral care for both Amerindians and English settlers. Today, 150 years on from that first service in Ushuaia, the Anglican church is established throughout South America, with national bishops of both indigenous and European descent working alongside the remaining few foreign missionaries in proclaiming the unchanging gospel to a very different continent to the one Stirling knew.

What we in the South American Anglican church owe to Stirling

• Spiritual vision: The same vision that led Stirling to commit his life to God’s service in South America inspires the church here today – the gospel that is able to transform lives and whole communities in the face of huge odds.
• Incarnational mission: Stirling’s mission was lived out and shown in the flesh. He suffered the early death of his first wife, and buried her in Argentina. He felt countless moments of untold loneliness as he watched for God on the southern shore. And his sacrificial mission was expressed not only with words, but also in practical service.
• Supporting structures: His appointment as bishop enabled him to establish, over many years, the structures that would allow his successors to build up what is today a fully-fledged Anglican church, embracing both indigenous and English peoples, as well as the current leadership by Latin American national bishops.

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