'What did you do in the great war, Dad?' asked the boy . . .

'I, my son? . . . Why, I took part in the great battle of Chilembwe!'
exclaimed the Father as he puffed out his chest with pride and
touched a ribbon which nestled close to his waistcoat pocket.

'Was it a big battle, Dad? I can't find anything in the history
books about it. Please tell me about it.'

'My son,' exclaimed the parent, 'you won't find anything in the
history books about it because it was too tremendous, too terrible,
too magnificent and too momentous to be compressed within the
poor pages of any mere book.'

CASSANDRA VATES, "'Zomba in 1950'", Book of the Fancy Fair . . . in aid
of the British Red Cross Fund, August 24th, 1918 (Zomba, 1918) ¹

THE anonymous satirist who wrote these sardonic words for a slim
volume in aid of a 1914-18 War charity in Zomba, the capital of
Britain's Nyasaland Protectorate, clearly believed that the 1915
Nyasaland Native Rising, led by the independent African pastor,
John Chilembwe, ² which Government forces suppressed in a mere
dozen days, was unworthy of serious consideration. Had he survived
into the 1940s, the period in which he set what he called his 'prophetic
phantasy written after a lobster supper', he might have been very
surprised to learn that academics had had the temerity to publish a
whole book about the episode, with its ramifications far from the
Cinderella of the Protectorates, as Nyasaland was often called, into
other parts of Africa, the British Isles, Europe and the United States
of America. And, indeed, he might have been astounded to learn
that, nearly three decades after the publication of this book, a paper-
back version had been prepared.

But the story of John Chilembwe and his enemies and associates
(particularly the radical British Christian missionary, Joseph Booth),
once heard, even in outline, is not one which is quickly forgotten.
Indeed, as the supplementary bibliography to this new reprint
demonstrates, since Independent African, the first book about John
Chilembwe to be published, appeared in 1958, writers of many
varieties have felt the fascination of his story and have explored in
books, articles, plays, poems and broadcasts, Chilembwe's career and
allied themes.

For Africans, especially those from his own country, he is a figure

-vii-