Clouds of Witnesses E-Book

Mark A. Noll

• Herausgeber: IVP
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 463

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

As Africa and Asia take their place as the new Christian heartlands, a new and robust company of saints is coming into view.In seventeen inspiring narratives Mark Noll and Carolyn Nystrom introduce pivotal Christian leaders in Africa and Asia who had tenacious faith in the midst of deprivation, suffering and conflict. Spanning a century, from the 1880s to the 1980s, their stories demonstrate the vitality of the Christian faith in a diversity of contexts.This kaleidoscopic witness to the power of the gospel will both inspire and educate. Whether for a class in global Christianity or for a personal journey to other times and places of faith, Clouds of Witnesses is a book that tugs at our curiosity and resists being laid down. An engaging traveling companion to Mark Noll's award-winning book The New Shape of World Christianity.

Leseprobe

Clouds of Witnesses

Christian Voices from Africa and Asia

Mark A. Noll and Carolyn Nystrom

InterVarsity Press P.O. Box 1400 Downers Grove, IL 60515-1426 World Wide Web: www.ivpress.com E-mail: [email protected]

© 2011 by Mark A. Noll and Carolyn Nystrom

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from InterVarsity Press.

InterVarsity Press® is the book-publishing division of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA®, a movement of students and faculty active on campus at hundreds of universities, colleges and schools of nursing in the United States of America, and a member movement of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. For information about local and regional activities, write Public Relations Dept. InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA, 6400 Schroeder Rd., P.O. Box 7895, Madison, WI 53707-7895, or visit the IVCF website at www.intervarsity.org.

Scripture quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Design: Cindy Kiple

Images: African sunset: Graeme Purdy/iStockphoto               Szari borders: Heidi Kalyani/iStockphoto               Kil photo: First ordained Korean clergymen/Samuel and Eileen Moffett

Carol and Jim Plueddemann

Paul and Priscilla Heidebrecht

Contents

List of Maps

Introduction

Southern Africa

1: Bernard Mizeki

2: John Chilembwe

3: Albert Luthuli

West Africa

4: William Wadé Harris

5: Byang Kato

East Africa

6: Simeon Nsibambi

7: Janani Luwum

India

8: Pandita Ramabai

9: V. S. Azariah

10: Sundar Singh

Korea

11: Sun Chu Kil

China

12: Dora Yu/Yu Cidu

13: Mary Stone/Shi Meiyu

14: John Sung/ Song Shangjie

15: Yao-Tsung Wu/ Wu Yaozong

16: Wang Mingdao

17: Ignatius Cardinal Kung/ Kung Pin-Mei

Afterword

For Further Reading

Index

Image Credits

About the Authors

More Titles from InterVarsity Press

Endorsements

List of Maps

Southern Africa

West Africa

East Africa

India

Korea

China

Introduction

The purpose of this book is to introduce readers in the Western world to noteworthy Christian believers from the recent history of the non-Western world. The momentous changes that have reconstructed the shape of Christianity in the world make introductions like this imperative. Today, in the early twenty-first century, there are far more active church participants in Africa than in Europe; a strong majority of the adherents to major denominational families like Pentecostals, Anglicans and Catholics live outside of North America and Europe; more missionaries are being sent out from places like South Korea, Brazil or Nigeria than from any European country; and it is not beyond the realm of possibility that within a few more years churchgoers in China may outnumber churchgoers in the United States of America. Respected historians and missiologists have provided a growing number of solid books charting the major features of the current situation and how it came about. (A few of these volumes are listed at the end of this book.) Clouds of Witnesses supplements these general studies by providing biographical accounts of seventeen significant individuals who made important contributions as Christian leaders during the century reaching from the 1880s to the 1980s.

The figures treated in this book come from Africa, India, Korea and China. These are by no means the only regions of rapid Christian advance (the newer Christian heartlands) that need to be introduced to believers in North America and Europe (the older Christian heartlands). Studies of other significant Christian lives would be equally instructive from South and Central America, the Philippines, the South Sea islands, southeast Asia, some parts of the Middle East and other places where flourishing believing communities have come to exist. But limiting subjects to just these four regions makes it possible to achieve some cohesion among the biographical sketches and also to produce a volume of manageable size.

Even with these geographical limits, the chapters of this book make only the barest beginning. Still, they do open up histories from which names may arise that one day count for the world Christian community the way that Evangeline Booth, William Carey, Billy Graham, Madam Guyon, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Hudson Taylor, John Wesley, George Whitefield and Francis Xavier now count among Western Christians.

As a book intending to make introductions, the chapters that follow provide basic information and some historical context, but only a little assessment. This strategy is intentional. At the present stage in history, as Western believers begin to learn about Christian developments elsewhere, the result is bound to be considerable wonder and some bewilderment. The marvel comes from facing up to the fact that in 1900 more than four-fifths of the world’s Christian population lived in Europe and North America, while a century later about two-thirds live outside those regions. The challenge for American and European believers who become aware of this epochal transformation is to grasp what it has meant for Christianity to take root in societies with often very different cultural norms from those in the West. Focused biographical attention is not all that is needed, but it can be a valuable strategy for entering the pathway of understanding that promotes sympathetic engagement and charitable discussion with brothers and sisters in Christ from around the world.

The Biographies

Clouds of Witnesses is organized partly by region and partly by chronology, with three biographies of significant leaders from the southern part of Africa coming first. It is particularly fitting that we begin with Bernard Mizeki, a crosscultural missionary, a lay catechist and a martyr, because the gospel has advanced most dramatically in the recent past where local believers have spread the faith and endured through great trial to the end. Next is John Chilembwe, whose activities as pastor, development worker and political rebel led to his early death and the apparent collapse of his far-sighted enterprises but that have made him a hero in contemporary Africa. Albert Luthuli was a tribal chief and faithful Christian before he assumed leadership in the African National Congress; his life story sheds light on the vitality of indigenous Christian faith in the complex and conflicted modern history of South Africa.

Our two chapters from West Africa feature lives from the first and last parts of the twentieth century. William Wadé Harris was one of the most visible “prophets” early in the twentieth century; his brief but spectacular preaching career helped much of his region move from missionary Christianity to African Christianity. Byang Kato offers a rec-ord of serious theological achievement that left a continuing legacy not only in his native Nigeria but also in many other African regions.

The two chapters from the other side of the continent tell a nearly continuous story. Simeon Nsibambi played a key role in the beginnings of the East African Revival that, with recent revivals in China, was certainly one of the twentieth century’s most important Christian renewal movements of any kind. The Anglican bishop Janani Luwum was a later product of the East African Revival whose faithfulness unto death left a sterling record to imitate in his native Uganda but also in a much wider circle.

These seven African “lives” represent only a few of the continent’s major Christian movements, but they nonetheless suggest the wealth of wisdom to be won by paying attention to Africa as a center of rapid Christian maturation as well as simple expansion.

From Africa our biographies move to India, where three studies explore how Indian believers deliberately adjusted their own cultural inheritances in accepting Christian faith but also how they adapted Western Christian traditions to Indian conditions. Pandita Ramabai was a pioneer traveler, institution builder and distinctly Indian teacher whose independent path made her a key figure in the rooting of Protestant-like Christianity in modern India. Vedanayagam Samuel Azariah enjoyed the distinction of serving as the first Anglican bishop in India to come from Indian stock; his long record of sacrificial service to the poor in his diocese and well beyond is, however, even more impressive than the ecclesiastical prominence he achieved. Sundar Singh, who earned the honorific title Sadhu (the teacher), was an independent thinker and evangelist about whose life considerable controversy accumulated. These controversies perhaps reveal more about Singh’s Western connections than about his noteworthy Indian ministry.

The book’s next portrait is of Sun Chu Kil, a Korean at the center of one of the most significant revivals of the early twentieth century and also of a landmark Korean attempt to obtain national independence. Because affairs of religion and politics mixed differently in Kil’s life than has become customary in the West, it only adds reasons for attending carefully to this important early leader in Korea’s momentous twentieth-century Christian history.

The book concludes with six studies from China, presented in roughly chronological order. Close attention to these biographies provides some historical clues for understanding the dramatic surge recently of Christianity in the world’s largest and also strongest Communist nation. Dora Yu was one of the most effective evangelists in the early history of modern Chinese Christianity; her significance is suggested by the fact that the celebrated Watchman Nee came to Christ under her ministry. The life of physician Mary Stone offers intriguing insights about a medical professional who carried out her work despite significant obstacles in China, as well as about the occasionally fraught relationship between Chinese and American forms of education, organization and ministry. John Sung was one of Mary Stone’s younger colleagues, who like her pursued advanced scientific study in the United States. How this talented chemist with a Ph.D. changed the direction of his career and in the 1930s became one of the world’s most effective evangelists offers much to ponder about sacrifice, discretion, zeal and more.

The sketches of the near contemporaries Y. T. Wu, Wang Mingdao and Ignatius Cardinal Kung are connected by their efforts to serve Christ and his people in China during desperate tumults in the 1930s and 40s and then under the Communist regime. In the face of extraordinary political, psychological and social pressures, Wu chose the path of negotiation as a way to preserve what he considered the essential elements of his Protestant training. By contrast, Wang took the road of resistance. Kung resembled Wang in his stance toward the regime, but as a Roman Catholic he differed considerably from his Protestant peers. Together, these lives communicate some of the drive, insight and tension that have made the recent history of Christianity in China such a powerful but also complicated story.

It is important to repeat that our primary purpose in presenting the biographies is to inform. But because these lives were so obviously shaped by powerful spiritual commitments, we pause at the end for a short afterword in order to reflect briefly on some of the general challenges presented to Western Christians by learning about such saints from around the world. A short list of books on the new conditions of world Christianity brings the book to a close.

Parameters

As authors, we are aware of the limitations under which we have written this book. Neither of us is a scholar in the world regions from which we have drawn our subjects, though we have benefited tremendously from the writings of those who are truly expert. As evangelical Protestants, it has been easier to find and write about individuals with connections to evangelical movements, though we have also made a point to include nonevangelicals, one Catholic and several others who are difficult to categorize by the standard definitions of Western Christian traditions. Obviously, more representative biographical coverage would have displayed a much broader ecumenical balance. Our justification for Clouds of Witnesses, despite such limitations, is the unusual degree to which we ourselves have been intellectually simulated, historically instructed and spiritually challenged by studying even a small and skewed sampling of biographical possibilities. We are aware that the book is fragmentary and preliminary, but we are also confident that even efforts of this kind can help Western believers learn about and learn from the new regions of world Christianity.

Our choice of subjects obviously reflect considerable bias. We selected individuals who we thought were significant, who struck us as personally interesting and about whom we could find accessible materials in English. Originally we had hoped to include several figures from Central and South America, but in the end we concluded that most Latin American biographies involved too much Catholic- Protestant conflict for a book focused on the world’s newer Christian regions. A few obviously important figures, like Watchman Nee and Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the first African Anglican Bishop, we did not include because they are already well known in Western Christian circles.

Other limitations are also inevitable for such a book. For some of the chapters, like our sketch of Bernard Mizeki, who died at the dawn of Christian expansion in southern Africa, documentary sources are fragmentary. For others, sources in English can be confusing, as with the seven or eight spellings and arrangement of names we found for the Korean we call Sun Chu Kil in chapter eleven. Furthermore, controversy attended some of our figures when they were living and in some instances long after their deaths. Was John Chilembwe a responsible patriot or a dangerous political agitator? Did the Sadhu Sundar Singh fabricate the stories he told about mystical encounters in Tibet? How secure is the documentation for the miracles recorded about the work of William Wadé Harris? Was Y. T. Wu wise or traitorous in accommodating Mao Zedong and the new regime of the People’s Republic of China, and was his contemporary Wang Mingdao courageous or foolhardy in resisting the Communists? These and similar interpretive questions, which can be raised for almost all of our figures, are good ones that deserve close attention. But they are not questions we try to answer in this book. Our intention, rather, has been to offer as much information in short compass as possible, to present controversial matters as fairly as we can, to try to communicate something about the humanity of each figure and then deliberately to step back. One of the benefits in this approach is to grasp how much sympathetic engagement is required even to begin serious assessment of peoples, cultures and activities very different from our own.

Clouds of Witnesses

We have taken our title from the memorable words of Hebrews 12:1-2: “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith” (RSV). In the section of Hebrews right before these verses, the author sketches the lives of Old Testament “witnesses”—from Abel through Noah, Abraham and Moses, to an unnamed throng of men and women—who had remained faithful to God in the face of great opposition and repeated traumas. Now he calls on readers to remember these ones as an encouragement for running “the race” with perseverance. The sketches were to help believers from latter-day times and faraway places follow Jesus who endured “the cross” and “the shame” in order to accomplish his saving work. Our “witnesses,” while not on the same plane as these biblical exemplars, may also serve as examples from other times and places of those who prevailed in their Christian profession. We call them “clouds” of witnesses to emphasize the many world regions in which the faith now flourishes.

The reference in our subtitle to “voices” is connected to another theme in the book of Hebrews, where we read about believers who “confessed” their faith. The “voices” heard in this book were, in the term from Hebrews, “confessors.” In several places the epistle speaks of Christian confession as that which believers profess about the Son of God, thus Jesus is “the high priest of our confession” (3:1). The author then urges believers, as they remember Christ’s high-priestly work, to “hold fast our confession” (4:14 RSV). Most expansively, the author urges his readers to draw on Christ’s faithfulness to them as they persevere in the hope that they have professed and as they stimulate one another to love and compassionate action. “Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful; and let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works” (10:23-24 RSV).

The lives sketched in this book belonged to individuals who held fast their confession of Christ but did so in circumstances different from what most Western believers have experienced. Our hope is that these stories encourage all who read the book to persevere in following Christ. It is an appeal to realize that the work of encouragement in Christ, which is so central to the book of Hebrews, has now taken on striking international dimensions. The clouds of witnesses who have been faithful, often through stresses that parallel what was described in Hebrews, are numerous; and they come from everywhere. How these witnesses confessed Christ in many tongues deepens, expands and enriches the story of salvation that the book of Hebrews proclaims.

Of course, our sketches are not inspired Scripture and so will contain mistakes, misapprehensions and misapplications. But since the biblical foundation holds—the truth that believers alive today can receive great encouragement from saints who have gone before—we are pleased to offer these sketches as an indication of how numerous and diverse the clouds of witnesses to God’s mercy have become and how wide that mercy continues to stretch in our present age.

Acknowledgments

Clouds of Witnesses is a companion volume to an earlier book published by InterVarsity Press, Mark Noll’s The New Shape of World Christianity: HowAmerican Experience Reflects Global Faith (2009). Where, however, that book explains new Christian realities in relationship to American history, this book focuses directly on events, persons and circumstances in the world’s newer Christian regions. Both books owe much to past and present editors at InterVarsity Press, including Joel Scandrett for initiating the projects, David Zimmerman and Dan Reid for shepherding the books into print, Krista Carnet for working hard at publicity, and especially Andy LePeau for a long and much-valued friendship with both authors. We offer heartfelt thanks to Maggie Noll for contributing indispensable research, organizing, fact-checking, editing and much else to both books. Mark Noll would like to thank classes in the recent world history of Christianity at Wheaton College, Regent College and the University of Notre Dame who have contributed a great deal to his understanding of recent Christian history. Carolyn Nystrom thanks several librarians at Wheaton College—including Nancy Falciani-White, Gregory Morrison and David Malone—for study space, friendly assistance and research diligence. We owe a special debt to Dan Bays for his assistance on our Chinese chapters. The notes on “Sources” that end each chapter include grateful acknowledgment of welcome help we received in preparing several of the individual chapters.

The book is dedicated with respect and affection to four individuals who for the authors and their families have been exemplary pastors, friends, teachers and role models as world Christians.

Southern Africa

1 Bernard Mizeki

c. 1861-1896

The First Anglican African Martyr

Bernard Mizeki

In October 1958, Jean Farrant was approached by the Information Board of the Anglican Diocese of Mashonaland in what was then called Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). The board asked her to write a modest sized pamphlet that could be distributed with a map to aid pilgrims who came annually to the Bernard Mizeki Shrine at Theydon, a site near Marandellas, which is itself located about an hour east of the Zimbabwe capital, Harare. Ms. Farrant took on this task reluctantly because, apart from being an Anglican herself and living in this district, she knew little about Bernard Mizeki. The assignment came at a delicate moment in the Christian, as well as political, history of southern Africa. The authority of the British colonial rulers was beginning to crumble, and the signs of rising African nationalism were unmistakable.

Upon setting to work, Farrant soon found much more material about the last ten years of Mizeki’s life than she could have imagined. But she was stymied in her quest for information about Mizeki’s early years. Then in an unexpected response to one last random request for information, she was directed to a small book, published in German in 1898, by a P. D. von Blomberg, of which the only known copies were housed at the British Museum and the Africana collection of the South African Public Library. Once translated, it turned out that this volume’s author was Paula Dorothea von Blomberg, a missionary in Cape Town, South Africa, who had conducted a school for Africans during the 1880s. It also turned out that Fräulein von Blomberg had identified Bernard Mizeki as her “most-loved pupil” and that she had recorded many heretofore unknown details about his early life. With this unexpected assistance, Farrant could record Mizeki’s life in considerable detail, which she proceeded to do in a book called Mashonaland Martyr, published in 1966 by Oxford University Press in Cape Town.

But the Mizeki story also witnessed several other unexpected turns after the publication of Farrant’s compelling biography. Those turns concerned the great transformation of political life in Southern Rhodesia that took place from the 1960s and even more the extraordinary transformation of Christianity in this same part of the world over the same time. For this later part of the Mizeki story, the distinguished historian of world Christianity Dana Robert provided a discerning update in 2006. She shows that Bernard Mizeki’s life is not only instructive for what happened while he was alive but also for how his memory has continued to be a living presence. A final introductory word is to note that the fragile quality of sources about Mizeki’s life illustrates some of the problems faced in reconstructing the early history of Christianity in areas that have recently become heartlands of the faith.

Early Life and Education

Mamiyeri Mizeka Gwambe was born in Portuguese East Africa (now Mozambique), probably in the year 1861. His childhood seems to have been an ordinary one for the early days of European colonial expansion on the continent, since the boy was raised in traditional African fashion but also worked for a time in a trader’s store where he learned a little Portuguese. Sometime between the ages of ten and fifteen, he left the place of his birth with a cousin who convinced the young Mamiyeri to go with him to Cape Town, South Africa. In that rapidly expanding city, which anchored the British empire in Africa’s southern cone, the lad found a new name, “Barns,” and a variety of jobs—on the docks, as a house servant, as a gardener. He also avoided common vices like the intemperance that beset many who came from the countryside into Africa’s growing cities. In 1885 or shortly before, Barns made the connections that changed his life and that would influence the course of African Christianity more generally: he was introduced to the Cowley Fathers, and he entered a night school taught by Fräulein von Blomberg. The Cowley Fathers was the informal name of the Society of St. John the Evangelist, a religious order of high-church Anglicans founded in the Oxford district of Cowley in 1865. It carried out its mission—to promote spiritual growth and education—in several cities of the British Empire during that empire’s rapid expansion in the second half of the nineteenth century. In Cape Town the Cowley Fathers linked their work to the school run by the Fräulein.

Barns soon became a favorite of the Fathers and at school because of his conscientious demeanor, but even more because of his intense interest in the Scriptures. On March 7, 1886, he was baptized along with six other young Africans. At the baptism he received the name “Bernard Mizeki.” It was the feast day of Saint Perpetua, who about the year 203 at Carthage had become one of Africa’s first Christian martyrs. Almost immediately thereafter, Bernard and several others asked the Cowley Fathers to train them as mission helpers. The baptismal photo that has been preserved shows him as short, square of face and with a determined countenance. He was then about twenty-five years old.

For the next five years Bernard attended Zonnebloem College, an institution that taught white, black, and colored (mixed-race) men and boys together. He assisted the Fräulein at her evening school and remained in close touch with the Cowley Fathers. Europeans found him shy, diffident and not particularly quick on the uptake. Yet over time they gave him an increasing range of duties assisting with various Anglican enterprises, which he fulfilled with honesty and efficiency. When Fräulein von Blomberg took him along on outings to villages, she discovered that he could be a warm and effective speaker. Only toward the end of his training did Mizeki’s intellectual paralysis in the presence of Europeans begin to give way; later the Cowley Fathers would look back and recall that Bernard’s gentleness had made the gospel message particularly attractive to other Africans.

Into Mashonaland

In January 1891, Mizeki met George Wyndham Hamilton Knight-Bruce, the newly appointed bishop of the recently created Anglican diocese of Mashonaland. Knight-Bruce, an earnest and enthusiastic young graduate of Eton and Oxford, had been the Bishop of Bloemfontein in South Africa. Now he was recruiting native helpers for his new diocese, which he had already explored on a long and arduous journey by foot.

As the control of the British Empire spread inland from the African coasts, so too did the Anglican Church. Elsewhere in southern Africa, missionaries had preceded empire, which led to conflict between the churches and the empire when colonial administrations arrived. In Mashonaland, where empire and church moved into African territory together, the problems were created by how native peoples responded to the incursion of church and empire.

Mashonaland, the region of the Shona people, lay in the north of what is now Zimbabwe, a landlocked region between the Zambezi River to the north and the Munyati River to the south that includes Zimbabwe’s capital city of Harare, which was known as Salisbury during Mizeki’s years. Earlier in the nineteenth century the Shona had been brutally conquered by the Ndebele people, but now both Shona and Ndebele were coming under the sway of the British, in particular the British South African Company of Cecil Rhodes. As part of “the scramble for Africa,” Rhodes and the company’s directors hoped to organize trading, mining and settlement in order to enrich themselves and bring civilization to the Africans. Bishop Knight-Bruce spoke out strongly against the political decisions that put Mashonaland under Rhodes’s control, but there was little he could do to hold back the tide of empire.

In April 1891, Bishop Knight-Bruce sailed with Mizeki and one other lay catechist from Cape Town to a port in Mozambique, from where they trekked westwards overland, carrying their own loads into the twenty thousand square miles of Mashonaland. The Africans went with the bishop as he met various subchiefs and sought suitable venues for their work. Mizeki eventually settled in a territory known as Theydon. It was controlled by Chief Mangwende, who lived in stone buildings abandoned by Portuguese traders. For the bishop’s gift of three pieces of calico and a few strings of beads, the chief allowed Mizeki to build a large mission hut near the chief’s imposing stone structure. That hut soon came to serve as church, school and dwelling. It was located on the banks of a river that supplied water for the garden Mizeki planted for growing his own food. He was on his own, sixty miles from the only other native catechist. For long stretches, his only outside visitor was Douglas Pelly, one of Bishop Knight-Bruce’s very few European colleagues. Dana Robert summarizes his situation in 1891 with these words: “Thus Bernard Mizeki, born in Mozambique, minimally educated in South Africa, and with little knowledge of either the Shona people or their language, was settled in the territory of Chief Mangwende.”

Missionary Mizeki

Almost immediately it became obvious that Mizeki had remarkable missionary gifts. Within a year he mastered the Shona language. Before he died, the student whose European teachers had worried about his intelligence became adept in eight different African languages, as well as English, Dutch and Portuguese. (He also acquired some French, Latin and Greek.)

Even more impressive than his linguistic ability were his practical talents, his amiability and his faithfulness. His garden was productive, he knew how to hunt and find firewood, and he showed his fondness for animal life by keeping three pet klipspringers (small antelopes). When smallpox threatened the region in 1895, Bernard administered vaccinations and so expanded the basic medical care he had been offering since coming to Mangwende’s territory.

As Mizeki mastered the Shona language, so too he grew close to the Shona people. Early on he won the friendship of Zandiparira, Mangwende’s head wife, who then served as his patroness in the community. Young children were drawn to him by his beautiful singing and by his willingness to teach them how to sing as well. Europeans who learned of his work sometimes complained that he wasted time on the Shona, who had a reputation for shiftlessness. But others were deeply impressed by how effectively Mizeki was reaching out through word, song and deed.

Day by day he said the Anglican daily offices of matins, prime, evensong and compline. He rose early to spend time reading the Scriptures and in prayer. And after catechumens had gathered to live around his mission hut, he began regular instruction in the basics of the Christian faith.

Mizeki taught the Shona that the deity they had known as Mwari—the creator God—was the Christian God and Father of Jesus. When locals warned him about the activity of other gods and spirits, who were thought to bring rain and control the unfolding of daily life, Mi­zeki insisted that it was Mwari, “our Father and Creator,” who caused the rain to fall and compassionately provided individuals and families with the means for sustaining life.

Mizeki’s first catechumen was John Kapuya, the son of a local nganga, a traditional diviner-healer. Bernard cared for this young man diligently, even to the point of finding a new place for him to live after members of his family and the ngangas began persecuting him. The first open convert was Chigwada Gawe, who took the name Joseph after he was baptized. Joseph’s young son was a special object of Bernard’s affection, although many observers remarked on his fondness for all children.

Bernard himself soon established a respected reputation as Umfundisi, the teacher. But he was also known as Mukiti, the celibate one, since in the face of local custom he remained single and chaste. After several years and much thought, however, he resolved to marry and took as his bride a young woman who had been an eager “hearer” at the missionary’s hut. She was Mutwa, who had been raised by one of Mang­wende’s daughters after her own mother died. With this step, Mizeki entered into Mangwende’s own kin network, a move that not only spoke of his identification with this people but also led to bitter resentment among other members of Mangwende’s large family. The wedding took place in early 1896 and was performed by an African Anglican priest, Hezekiah Mtobi, who had only shortly before come to Mashonaland from Grahamstown, South Africa, as the first African cleric to join the Shona mission.

From his base in Mangwende’s territory, Mizeki journeyed on foot throughout the locality to preach the Christian message. He also contributed substantially to translation efforts under the direction of Bishop Bruce-Knight, for which he traveled regularly to the bishop’s home in Umtali. Bernard’s linguistic abilities made him a leader in efforts that soon resulted in Seshona translations of the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, the creed and other passages from the Bible.

Mizeki’s obvious talents drew the attention of colonial officials who from time to time asked him to serve as an official interpreter. It would have been easy for Mizeki to secure well-compensated employment as a translator in Umtali, but he chose to remain in Theydon. African catechists like Mizeki received only a sparse living allowance and occasional bits of cash for pocket money. His own catechumens reported that he remained entirely content.

After several years of labor Mizeki’s work prospered to the point that it was necessary to think about a new setting for the mission. After some deliberation and with Mangwende’s approval he decided to move his small community—several families and a number of small boys who had been entrusted to his care for education—across the river to a fertile site about two miles distant. The band of trees and the spring that marked this new location had a special significance, for it was considered a sacred grove inhabited by the spirits of the tribe’s ancestral lions. Locals worried about desecrating this sacred place, but Mizeki forged ahead as part of a systematic plan to reform what he saw as the evil practices of the Shona, including the killing of twin babies, habitual drunkenness, the offering of sacrifices to spirits and the harsh treatment (or murder) of individuals named by the ngangas as sorcerers. When Bernard was urged to make a small offering to the ancestral spirits before taking up his new place of residence, he instead drew the sign of the cross in the air and carved crosses in the trees at the edge of the sacred grove. Soon after moving, Mizeki felled some trees in the grove to make room for a field of wheat. This action would later be reported as sparking particularly strong resentment.

The End and a Beginning

Local hostility against Mizeki along with aftershocks from British imperial expansion created the forces that brought Mizeki’s promising mission to its fatal conclusion. In early 1896 the Shona were caught up in a rebellion, initiated by the Ndebele a few years earlier, against Cecil Rhodes’s British South African Company. Although the Ndebele were harsh oppressors of the Shona, the Ndebele resistance against British rule inspired the Shona. British leaders, including the Anglican missionaries, were surprised when the Shona joined in rebellion. But the Shona had also reacted to the new colonial order, with its hut tax, its mandated inoculations and its burning of infected cattle. In addition, the mid-1890s witnessed a tumultuous period of drought, locust plagues, new diseases for cattle and widespread famine that further poisoned relations between Africans and their new imperial rulers.

Locally, one of Mangwende’s many sons had taken particular offense at Mizeki’s entrance into the community, especially his marriage to one of Mangwende’s own grandchildren. This anger was fueled by several ngangas who, quite correctly, saw Mizeki’s new religion as an assault on their traditional worldview and the authority they had exercised in the local community. In mid-June 1896, messengers brought news to Mizeki’s local enemies that the Shona were attacking Europeans in nearby regions. This communication prompted a decision to go after Mizeki.

Shortly before, instructions had been sent to all Anglican catechists and teachers to gather for safety at a fortified mission farm. The message came from a member of Bishop Knight-Bruce’s staff, since the bishop himself was absent in England, where he would die later that same year from malaria contracted in Mashonaland. Mizeki hesitated when this message arrived, since he felt bound by Bishop Knight-Bruce’s earlier instructions to stay at Theydon. In addition, Mizeki had only recently given hospitality to an ill and incapacitated older man at the mission compound. Among the Shona it was a well-established cultural norm that the sick could be cared for only by family members; if Mizeki left this new patient, he knew that no one else would look after him.

The upshot was that Mizeki sent this reply: “Mangwende’s people are suffering. The Bishop has put me here and told me to remain. Until the Bishop returns, here I must stay. I cannot leave my people now in a time of such darkness.”

On Sunday, June 14, 1896, Bernard rang the mission bell for matins. No one came, not even Zandiparira, who had not missed a service in four years, nor those who were residing with Mizeki at the mission compound. Mutwa, his wife, had been told what was up: the local nganga was enraged; he had been informed by the spirits that Christianity was sorcery and Bernard was a sorcerer; for cutting down the sacred trees there was a sentence of death. Mutwa, who was pregnant, urged Mizeki to leave. He demurred.

On Wednesday evening, June 17, after taking in a stranger who arrived late and asked for lodging, Mizeki and Mutwa saw bonfires in the hills surrounding their residence. About midnight, Bernard answered a loud knocking at his door where someone announced that European troops had killed Mangwende. (They had not.) When Mi­zeki stepped outside, he was assaulted by three men, one of whom drove a spear deep into his side. Mutwa followed and threw herself on top of Bernard, but the men dragged her off and pitched her back into the hut. When she emerged, the men had gone and Mizeki seemed to be dead. Quickly she ran to find the wife of Chigwada Gawe (“Joseph”), who returned with her to the hut. Mizeki was not there. They called for him, and he answered from a short distance away beside a nearby spring. He told them that he had been attacked by three of her relatives, that he was dying, and that he wanted Mutwa and their child to be baptized. He said that other teachers would come and that all of Mutwa’s people would become Christians. Then she and her companion returned to their hut to find blankets and prepare sustenance for her wounded husband.

At this point it is worth quoting Jean Farrant’s book, since she exerted great pains collecting all possible sources of information and, in the late 1950s, actually interviewed Mutwa and several other Africans who as young people were at or close to the scene in June 1896.

As [the women] left the hut to climb the slope again, they halted in terrified amazement. They were almost blinded by a great and brilliant white light. The whole of the hillside was lit up, and there was a noise “like many wings of great birds.” The noise was coming lower and lower, and as they crouched on the ground, covering their eyes, the women saw through their fingers that in the centre of the light, where Bernard lay, there was a strange red glow. They were very frightened and hid themselves, shaking from head to foot. After a long time, the noise ceased and they dared to look again. The light had gone, and they crept up the hill to the rock above the spring. It was empty. Bernard had gone. They never saw him again.

Farrant also discovered alternative accounts that came second- and thirdhand from both Africans and Europeans. After her own careful sifting of all the evidence she could find, she concluded: “It is left to the individual Christian mind to accept or reject the supernatural light, but it seems certain that something happened that night which to the Africans was beyond explanation, which frightened them very much, and made a deep impression.”

Commemorating a Martyr

The Shona rebellion was finally put down in the fall of 1897. Mutwa and the daughter born after Mizeki’s death were baptized, but for several decades the Christian work among the Shona advanced slowly. In 1899 a white Anglican priest returned to where Mizeki had established his mission and founded a school for boys. Later missionaries identified the site of the martyrdom, planted a cross and memorialized his death with an annual service on June 18. After more investigation of the site in the early 1930s, another white Anglican built a circular shrine. It was consecrated in June 1938 at a service attended by a hundred Europeans and a thousand Africans, including “Joseph” (Chigwada Gawe). In 1946, on the fiftieth anniversary of Mizeki’s death, a larger crowd, which included Mutwa and her daughter, gathered for a celebratory service of Communion and to hear a message read from the governor of Rhodesia.

Into the mid-twentieth century, white Anglicans sponsored commemorations of Mizeki’s death. The Cowley Fathers eagerly promoted Mizeki’s story wherever their missionary work spread. The picture they offered was of the faithful convert, loyal friend and inspiring Anglican. Commemorations slowly picked up speed. By the time of Jean Farrant’s book in 1966, memorials of many kinds—stained glass, reliquaries, murals, inclusion on provincial Anglican calendars in South and Central Africa—existed in Swaziland, Botswana, South Africa and Rhodesia.

With the rise of African independence the image of Mizeki changed. The meaning of his life was hotly contested especially during the anticolonial war that led to the transformation of Rhodesia into Zimbabwe. Some ardent nationalists called him a colonial collaborator; others saw him as a sign of African dignity. For the latter, his efforts at defining the Shonas’ ancestral deity, Mwari, as the Christian God became a symbol of his identification with African aspirations.

In South Africa, Anglican leaders founded a Bernard Mizeki Guild in 1973. Its purpose was to provide an Anglican meeting place for migrant workers coming into South Africa who found Anglican worship confining and so were drifting off to Methodist or African Independent Churches. The guild, with its lay-led, informal, worker-friendly environment, spread rapidly. After Zimbabwe gained its independence in 1980, the place of Mizeki’s martyrdom became an increasingly popular pilgrimage site. African Anglicans now conducted a Eucharist on the weekend closest to June 18, and pilgrimages to the site were considered a continuation in Christian form of the ancient Shona practice of travel to sacred places.

Dana Robert has provided an account of what the annual commemoration was like by the early 2000s. Pilgrims arrived on the Thursday ahead of the Communion service; there was much singing and dancing, as well as many fires (to fend off the cold of the southern- hemisphere winter). On Friday a competition took place among church choirs. On Saturday, after a huge procession, local bishops and the archbishop of Central Africa celebrated a two-hour Communion service, with much singing. The liturgy was spoken in the many languages of the Church of the Province of South Africa. After the official service, Africans renowned for their charismatic gifts conducted healings. On Saturday night, bonfires once again encircled the hills. On Sunday, local Anglican priests led a final Eucharist. Throughout the weekend, pilgrims ascended to the spot from where Mizeki is said to have disappeared. The stand of trees surrounding the place had once again become a sacred grove, with Shona religious traditions taken up into Christian remembrance. When in recent celebrations, some participants have tried to make political statements about Zimbabwe’s current situation, most of the other participants have turned aside. In 2005, despite Zimbabwe’s internal political tensions, massive shortages of food and fuel, and an unemployment rate of 80 percent, almost twenty thousand pilgrims attended the annual festival.

Sources

The diligently researched book by Jean Farrant, Mashonaland Martyr: Bernard Mizeki and the Pioneer Church (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1966), is the basis for much of this chapter. The quotation from Mizeki is on p. 208, and Farrant’s account of what happened after his death is on pp. 216-22. Material on the memory of Mizeki in this chapter is taken from Dana L. Robert, “St. Patrick and Bernard Mizeki: Missionary Saints and the Creation of Christian Communities” (Occasional Publication no. 19, Yale Divinity School Library, 2005), which is also expanded in Dana Lee Robert, Christian Mission: How Christianity Became a World Religion (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), pp. 167-70. Information about the first record from 1909 of the great light and sound of birds at Mizeki’s death is found on p. 177 of Terrence Ranger, “Taking Hold of the Land: Holy Places and Pilgrimages in Twentieth-Century Zimbabwe,” Past and Present 117 (1987): 158-94.

2 John Chilembwe

c. 1870-1915

Holistic Christian and Accidental Rebel

John Chilembwe (seated) with wife Ida and daughter Emma

January 15 is John Chilembwe Day in the landlocked central African country of Malawi, which lies between Mozambique on the east, south and west; Tanzania on the northeast; and Zambia on the northwest. The long Lake Malawi (or Lake Nyasa) makes up much of the country’s eastern border with Tanzania and Mozambique. Most of its southern border is formed by the Zambezi River, which Europeans read much about in books written by the pioneering explorer and missionary David Livingstone. Malawi, formerly the British colony of Nyasaland, became independent in 1964; as one of its first official acts the newly independent nation issued a stamp in memory of John Chilembwe and the revolt he had led against British imperial oppression fifty years before.

That revolt was one of several African reactions at about the same time to the tide of European colonialism that swept over the continent from the 1880s onward. In South Africa, for example, the African National Congress, which decades later became that country’s ruling political party after the overthrow of apartheid, was established in 1912. The revolt under Chilembwe in Nyasaland shared much with these other initiatives, including its desire to establish “Africa for the Africans” and escape subservience to Europeans. But there is much in the Nyasaland story that also makes it important as a Christian story.

One of the three Europeans killed in the short-lived 1915 revolt was William Jervis Livingstone, a distant relative of David Livingstone. The famous Livingstone, David, had worked near the site of John Chilembwe’s revolt, as he evangelized and tried to provide economic alternatives to slavery. Moreover, William Jervis Livingstone was employed on an estate owned by a wealthy Scotsman, Alexander Low Bruce, who was married to David Livingstone’s daughter. Most strikingly, the father of the murdered plantation overseer had long served in his native Scotland as a missionary on the Isle of Skye and then as a Baptist pastor. The irony is that John Chilembwe, leader of the 1915 revolt, was also a Baptist pastor and missionary who like David Livingstone had given himself to evangelizing and providing economic self-sufficiency for Africans. The bloody events of early 1915 were unusual in themselves. They were also the culmination of a story filled with complex interpersonal relations, worldwide geographical connections and memorable initiatives on behalf of new African believers.

Joseph Booth Comes to Nyasaland

A fateful meeting in 1892 between a strong-minded British missionary and an unusually capable native serving “boy” constitutes the first act of this dramatic story. Early that year Joseph Booth had arrived in the Zambezi region as a mature forty-one-year-old dissenting Protestant of decidedly independent convictions. The area was only just being defined as a British Protectorate, soon to be called Nyasaland, in the wake of competition among Britain, Germany, Portugal, Belgium and France for colonies throughout the continent.

Booth had been raised in an English home where Christian ethics enjoyed great respect but also where unorthodox opinions prevailed (Booth’s father was a Unitarian). At an early age Booth indicated his contrarian course by posing questions to his father about the military service of Booth’s grandfather and uncles. These relatives often boasted of the number of enemy troops they had killed in battle. The young Booth challenged his father to explain how the biblical commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” could be squared with that boasting. His father, who had insisted that young Booth memorize and regularly repeat the commandments, floundered in providing an answer. In response, Joseph Booth abandoned Christianity and set off on a course of religious searching.

Again to indicate the singular course of Booth’s spiritual journey, he was set back on the path of more orthodox Christianity by reading the religious writings of Thomas Paine. Paine at the time was reviled as one of the great infidels of his age; what Booth took from him was not infidelity, however, but Paine’s confession that it was impossible to deny that Jesus of Nazareth actually lived. From that starting point, Booth moved on to embrace standard Christian teachings, though always with his own distinctive emphases. For instance, from his earliest days as a convinced believer, Booth was a consistent pacifist—his early doubts about the use of deadly force in battle led on to a deep aversion to any use of violence. Booth was always an independent operator who set up his own organizations and who remained very much his own man as he tried to change the world for Christ.

Booth’s route to the mission field was circuitous. Before his own faith stabilized he migrated in 1880 to New Zealand, where he showed his practical abilities by becoming a successful sheep farmer. In 1886 he joined the Tabernacle in Auckland, a church pastored by Thomas Spurgeon, son of the famous London minister Charles Haddon Spurgeon. Under Thomas Spurgeon’s guidance, Booth made a firm commitment to Christ and took part in a range of Christian ministries. Then Booth moved to Australia, where he established successful restaurants in Melbourne and became a deacon in a local Baptist church. When in Melbourne he experienced a call to missionary service and tried to enlist in the China Inland Mission of J. Hudson Taylor but was told he was already too old. Undaunted, Booth organized his own supporters in Australia, Scotland, and England and set off for Africa. His models were David Livingstone and the first British missionary to India, the Baptist William Carey. Booth found both Livingstone and Carey particularly inspiring because they combined a strong commitment to evangelism with an equal commitment to the economic development of the evangelized.

Booth arrived in Nyasaland at a time of colonial ferment. The new British administration was trying to sort out land claims involving colonial settlers and the many African tribes of the region. British officials were also struggling to outlaw the slave trade that Arab merchants and powerful African chiefs had no intention of giving up without a fight. The British colonial administration was being helped (and critiqued) by the Scottish and English missionaries who had worked in the region for a generation. Missionary labor near Lake Nyasa had begun at the instigation of David Livingstone in the late 1850s, but spectacular failures had occurred before church planting got underway in the 1870s. Progress remained slow as colonial-African, Arab-African, and intra-African tribal conflicts all contributed to tumult and disorder.

Booth came to Nyasaland with a teenage son and a young daughter. Their mother, who had encouraged Booth’s move to missionary service, died in Australia shortly before they embarked for Africa. The motherless family struggled in its first weeks on the field. They were not at all helped by their first house servants, whose skills were much more advanced in pilfering and malingering than in cooking, translating or foraging. Into this discouraging situation came a young man, perhaps twenty years old, who spoke only a few words of English but who told the Booths he had heard they were looking for reliable help.

A Fateful Meeting

Little hard information survives about John Chilembwe’s early life. His father was of the Yao people, who had won a reputation for fierce resistance to the European colonizers, and his mother was a member of the Mang’anja tribe, who were said to be marked by softer human virtues. A period of instruction at a Church of Scotland mission school had introduced him to the English language. That school was in Blantyre, which was becoming a center of British administration in the area between the southern end of Lake Nyasa and the Zambezi River. (Blantyre took its name from the Scottish birthplace of David Livingstone.)

Immediately the new houseboy won the respect of the Booth family, then their admiration and soon their love. He was honest, meticulous, caring and self-giving. The depth of affection between the Booths and John Chilembwe is indicated by what the two surviving members wrote after the tragic events of 1915. (The teenaged son had died as a youth in Nyasaland.) The young daughter, Emily Booth, whom Chilembwe nursed through several life-threatening illnesses, later returned to Britain, married and years later published a memoir about her experiences in Africa—in it she had only kind things to say about Chilembwe. For his part Joseph Booth, though he repudiated Chilembwe’s turn toward violence, was even more deeply attached. After Chilembwe was killed and he himself had been expelled from Africa because British authorities connected him (without cause) to the Chilembwe revolt, Booth wrote these tender words:

Poor kindhearted Chilembwe, who wept with and for the writer’s fever-stricken and apparently dying child; nursed and fed the father with a woman’s kindness during 10 months of utter prostration; wept, laboured with and soothed the dying hours of my sweet son John Edward [18 years old] at the close of a 2 month’s toilsome journey to the ocean post, for food and goods, in flood time of rainy season, 1894. . . . Yes, dear Chilembwe, gladly would I have died[,] by my own countrymen shot, to have kept thee from the false path of slaying.

With Chilembwe’s help, Booth’s labors in Nyasaland bore fruit in converts and in the establishment of the Zambezi Industrial Mission, located in Mitsidi, just west of Blantyre. Chilembwe was a critical part of that success as steward of the household, translator for the Africans and also Booth’s star pupil. Anglican and Church of Scotland missionaries distrusted Booth because his Baptist faith was so single-mindedly biblical and so independent. Colonial officials were nervous because he promoted African economic self-sufficiency so vigorously. Through his Zambezi Industrial Mission, Booth taught primarily agricultural skills aimed at preparing natives to sell homegrown coffee and other products in the emerging market towns of the region. But the mission also trained workers in crafts and small-scale manufacturing with the intent of providing economic foundations for community self-development and self-organization. And all within the context of conservative, Bible-driven, Baptist piety.

Booth explicitly spelled out his vision for Christian mission in Africa on several occasions. One of these occasions was the formation of an “African Christian Union” in Blantyre in January 1897. Included in the twenty “objectives” of this union was, first, “to unite together in the name of Jesus Christ such persons as desire to see full justice done to the African race and are resolved to work towards and pray for the day when the African people shall become an African Nation.” Other objectives included equal legal treatment for Africans and Europeans, repentance for “the great wrongs inflicted upon the African race in the past and in the present,” establishment of profitable agricultural and industrial operations run by Africans, education for training Africans in liberal arts and practical subjects, and restitution of African lands appropriated by the European colonial powers. It also called on black Americans and Caribbeans of African descent to come to Africa as workers for the reconstruction of the continent, and it asked the United States government to “make a substantial monetary grant to each adult Afro-American desiring to be restored to African soil, as some recognition of the 250 years of unpaid slave labor and the violent abduction of millions of Africans from their native land.”