Page 22 - Number 2 2021 Volume 74

10 The Society of Malaŵi Journal

out of darkness into light, because an African woman, unlike her
American sister, does not exert an influence for good or evil on her
husband. The ordinary African woman in her heathen state is ignorant,
uninteresting and unlovable. I almost despair when I think of her
ignorance, her utter lack of ambition…it is sad to see a young mother,
little more than a girl, with an infant on her back and know she is thrust
into responsibility for which she is quite unfit, and that at a time when
she should be taken care of, and she ought to have been left to the joys
of young womanhood…as my little wife, one night after my prayer she
said when she heard my cry that the women and girls are very difficult to
work amongst…please help us…Mrs Chilembwe needs good friends to
help her in her undertaking. She needs to teach our young women that
God has a purpose in creating man, male and female, and that women
have work to do that man cannot do…the world will not go forward as it
should till women have been taught and have learned to take the place
God has ordained for them as man’s helpmeet – his equal, not his slave”.
John Chilembwe’s sentiment on the apparent suitability of an African woman in
her ‘natural state’, presumably thinking of such in terms as a potential wife for an
educated African man, would be repeated decades later, admittedly in more
nuanced terminology, by fellow American educated Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda.
In my introductory paragraph I wrote that any appreciation of Ida
Chilembwe’s life is of necessity inextricably interwoven with that of her husband,
Pastor John Chilembwe and, as will have been seen, such has clearly been the
case. However, as I conclude I wish to remove Ida Chilembwe from the penumbra
of her husband’s genius and suggest she is in fact due far greater recognition in
her own right.
In his later years, John Chilembwe suffered greatly from very poor
health. He was asthmatic and short-sighted almost to the point of blindness,
doubtless significant factors in the general malaise he endured stoically for so
long. To offer a sense of his understandable bouts of depression I shall again quote
from a letter, again to The National Baptist Convention Board in the USA, written
in June 1911.
Dear Brother: I regret to write to you of an accident which has just
occurred. Yesterday, my little wife, industriously, did her washing and
at the close of day, put the clothes in a room, forgetting to put out a lamp.
About midnight it exploded, and we were unable to extinguish the
flames. The people were afraid to come to our rescue because of the
leopards, who are engaged in destroying our livestock around the station,
and my eyes being so weak and bad, I cannot hunt and kill them.
Alas, all our clothing is burnt to ashes. My wife had nothing but night
garment and me in pyjamas. My children are all naked.