Blantyre Mission Stories of its Beginning

Kambwiri Matecheta

Description

When he was ordained in 1911, the Reverend Harry Kambwiri Matecheta became the first Malawian Presbyterian minister. Forty years later when he published Blantyre Mission: Nkhani za Chiyambi Chake (Hetherwick Press, 1951), he became Malawi's first church historian. Going beyond recounting facts, he offered his own distinctive analysis, which remains highly relevant to church and nation today. Thokozani Chilembwe and Todd Statham's beautifully prepared new edition makes this seminal text available to all who wish to expand their understanding of Malawi's history.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Christian Church
• Religion
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Luviri Press
• Date de parution: 17 septembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789996066597
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 5 Mo

Extrait

Blantyre Mission Stories of its Beginnings

Copyright Wichern-Verlag GmbH, Berlin 2020 First published by Wichern Verlag, Berlin (ISBN 978-3-88981-422-7) for the Berliner Gesellschaft für Missionsgeschichte in 2016 Translated from Chichewa:Blantyre Mission: Nkhani za Ciyambi Cace (Blantyre: Hetherwick Press, 1951) and annotated by Thokozani Chilembwe and Todd Statham All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any from or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior permission from the publishers. Published by Luviri Press P/Bag 201 Luwinga Mzuzu 2 ISBN 978-99960-66-58-0 eISBN 978-99960-66-59-7 The Luviri Press is represented outside Malawi by: African Books Collective Oxford ([e-mail]) www.luviripress.blogspot.com www.africanbookscollective.com Cover: Josephine Kawejere and Daniel Neumann

Blantyre Mission Stories of its Beginning Harry KambwiriMatecheta Translation, introduction and annotation Thokozani Chilembwe and Todd Statham

Luviri Press Mzuzu 2020

Colonial map of Nyasaland (Malawi) www.britishempire.co.uk/maproom/nyasaland.htm.

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Editors’ Introduction  6 ‘AGrand Old Man’ of Christianity in Malawi 9 ‘Rewriting and Re-Righting’ the Early History of Christianity in Malawi 19 Harry Kambwiri Matecheta Blantyre Mission Stories of its Beginnings 31 1. How it all Began 32 2. Slavery 34 3. The Battle of Mkanala at Chiwambo 35 4. The Arrival of the Mandala Brothers 39 5. Life at School 45 6. The Church Grows 59 7. Cleland’s Courage 60 8. Sicknesses at the Mission 61 9. Panthumbi Station 66 10. The War 71 11. Building the Blantyre Church 75 12. Training for Holy Ministry 78 13. The Year 1915 84 14. The Word of God Reaches Mihekani 88 15. Building the Nation 88 16. Official Opening Ceremony of the HHI 93 Editors’ Postscript 95

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Editors’ Introduction

Harry Kambwiri Matecheta’sBlantyre Mission: Nkhani za Ciyambi Caceseminal text of the history of Christianity inis a central Africa. It provides an account—rich in detail and colour— of the Church of Scotland’s Blantyre Mission in Malawi, c.1876- c.1930, from the perspective of one of its leading African members, the evangelist and pastor Harry Kambwiri Matecheta. While mission scholarship has traditionally given priority to western missionaries as the agents of Christianization, there has been a welcome shift of late toward the privileging of indigenous Christians as the main actors in the Christianization process. However necessary (and long overdue) this shift is, it is often difficult to recover the so-called ‘indigenous factor’ in missions history when so many of the evangelists, church-planters, pastors, and prophets responsible for the dramatic growth of Christianity in the Global South in the past century remain anonymous. Even apart from the regrettable cultural paternal- ism and racial bias that has kept new Christians on the margins of much traditional historiography, the fact is that often only a thin paper trail exists for scholars who seek to follow the central role of new Christians in the modern story of missions. With Matecheta’sBlantyre Mission, we are truly fortunate to possess an engaging account of the growth of Christianity in Malawi by a new Christian whose active role in the story stretched over sixty years, and whose significance for the story is probably second to none.

This valuable text is well deserving of a translation from Chinyanja intoEnglish for the use of students and scholars of mission history and the history of Christianity in Africa. The Presbyterian Blantyre Mission in southern Malawi, along with its sister mission of Livingstonia in the north of the country — which Stephen Neill considered as ‘certainly among the best organized 6

1 missions in the world’ — as well as the Nkhoma Mission (Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa) in the central region, were at the forefront of emergent Christianity in Malawi in the late 19th and early 20th century, exerting an influence far beyond church jurisdiction to include politics, culture, and education. Accord- ingly, scholars can consult Matecheta’sBlantyre Missionfor insights into the early political and social development of Malawi: for example, Matecheta writes as an eyewitness of the military pacification of the Ngoni and Yao tribes that refused to acknowledge the colonial partition of Africa that had subjected them to the British crown, as well as the famous 1915 uprising led by John Chilembwe against the British. Yet the chief value of Blantyre Mission: Stories of its Beginningis as a mission’s text, a true insider’s account of the early history of Christianity in Malawi. In translation, it can now take its place alongside those other indispensable texts of early Malawian Christianity penned by new Christians, like Yesaya Mwasi’sEssential and Paramount Reasons for Working Independently[1933], Daniel Mtusu’sThe Autobiography of an African[1925], and Samuel Ntara’sMan of Africa[1934], many of whom—like Matecheta himself was— were products of the ambitious Presbyterian/Reformed mission 2 schools.

1  Stephen Neill,A History of Christian Missions,rev. ed. (London: Penguin, 1986), p. 327. 2  #1 7

Rev. Harry Kambwiri Matecheta (1870 to 1962) Undated photo held by National Archives of Malawi, File 70/CHM/1/1. Used by permission

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Harry Matecheta Kambwiri: ‘A Grand Old Man’ of Christianity in 1 Malawi

WhileBlantyre Missionprovides much biographical information about its author, it is, strictly speaking, not an autobiography. A brief biographical sketch of Matecheta is appropriate in order to set the stories told inBlantyre Missionin the context of the author’s remarkable career and life—a long life that spanned the terrible days of the slave trade and the tribal conflagrations in the Lake region of central Africa in the 1870s to the twilight of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland in the early 1960s. At the time of his death in 1962, Harry Kambwiri Matecheta was both a ‘grand old man’ of Christianity in Malawi and anagogo [grandfather] of a nation that would emerge independent of British rule only two years later as the Republic of Malawi.

Around 1870 Kambwiri Matecheta was born in the village of Nguludi in the Chiradzulu area of the Shire Highlands in (what is 2 today) southern Malawi. Matecheta’s Yao people were part of a great movement of peoples from southeastern and southern Africa into the region around Lake Malawi during the latter half

1  The expression ‘grand old man’ is owed to George Shepperson, who applies it to Matecheta in his introductory note to Clement Matecheta’s unpublished (and undated) posthumous biographical sketch of his father,The African Ministry, which is in manuscript form in the Malawi National Archives (File 70/CHM/1/1). 2  This sketch of Matecheta’s life draws heavily from Thokozani Chilembwe, ‘Matecheta, Harry Kambwiri’,Dictionary of African Christian Biography(2014): www.dacb.org/stories/malawi/matecheta-harry.html. Also valuable is Emily Ngwira, ‘The Life and Times of Harry Kambwiri Matecheta 1870—1962’, (Unpublished History Seminar Paper, Chancellor College, University of Malawi, 1973). 9