Page 15 - Number 2 2021 Volume 74

Ida Z. Chilembwe – Pioneer Nyasa Feminist 3

[Ida’s] father was Portuguese. Ida Chilembwe testified to the Commission
8
of Enquiry on the Chilembwe rising that she was Makololo by tribe .
While visiting the U.S.A. in 1953, George Shepperson related that in an interview
9
with the Rev. Landon Cheek , Chilembwe’s first African American helper at the
PIM, Cheek had asserted that Ida was a ‘local woman’ and that he was present at
Chilembwe’s wedding ceremony. Cheek himself returned to the USA in mid-1906
with his Nyasa bride Rachel, Chilembwe’s niece.
Historically, both Arab traders and Portuguese colonists miscegenated
freely throughout east and central Africa and it has been common for the offspring
of such unions to acknowledge the race of their non-African forebear even beyond
a number of subsequent unions entirely within their indigenous community. Close
examination of the relatively few known photographs of Ida fail to suggest any
clear trace of either European physiognomy or skin toning; however, such clearly
does not by any means constitute proof.
10
In The Church History of Providence Industrial Mission the author
Patrick Makondesa asserts that Chilembwe first met Ida during a visit to
Chikwawa whilst acting as an interpreter for the missionary Joseph Booth. When,
in 1900, Chilembwe returned to Nyasaland from the USA and founded his own
church, Ida became one of his first students. It was a short apprenticeship from
student to teacher as John and Ida married in 1904, two years after the arrival of
the African American Baptist missionary Miss Emma B. DeLaney with whom Ida
worked assiduously and in close harmony at Mbombwe. Together they ensured
that the mission compound presented a clean and tidy impression, with bush and
scrub removed, detritus cleared and with grass and colourful flowers, such as roses
and pelargoniums (geraniums), carefully planted European style to best effect; far
removed from the many surrounding African villages. In such respects it mirrored
many European mission stations and neatly complemented the European inspired
‘dress and deportment’ aspirations John Chilembwe pursued so diligently; and
which clearly and independently reflected Ida’s own inclinations and objectives.
It may be worth considering whether, prior to Ida joining the PIM as a young
student, and given her apparent part-Portuguese heritage, whether she had earlier
attended a Catholic Mission school which had inculcated her strong sense of place
and discipline? In any event, Ida’s evident determination, self-possession and self-

46-50.
th
8 In the transcript of her appearance before District Magistrate Turnbull on 8
February 1915, Ida is described as ‘½ caste Magololo’.
9 Landon Cheek married John Chilembwe’s niece Rachel at the Blantyre boma on
13th June 1904, the month following John and Ida’s marriage at the same boma
on the 11 May of that year.
th
10 Patrick Makondesa. Zomba. Kachere Series. 2006.