ABSTRACT
In Independent African, religious ideology is a theme secondary to the presentation of the radical political influences on John Chilembwe, especially those of Booth and American blacks. The government's attitude towards Chilembwe was one of caution tempered by the suspicion that the Catholic warnings were a product of inter-mission rivalry. The period 1909–1914 was one of growing alienation from European rule. Recruitment into the western institutional churches slumped as solutions to social ills were sought in traditional remedies, or in millennial dreams preached in the proliferating semi-independent churches. The essential dualism of Christianity, its grace and works, passion and action, cross and sword, provided a formulation of the latent needs of Africans in the protectorate, but an ambivalent one. The Nyasaland rising of 1915 provides a paradigm of the divisiveness of missionary Christianity as an ideology of political action in the colonial period.
