Page 38 - 2020 SoMJ Vol 73 No 2_Neat

John Chilembwe and Juma Chimwere 29

shared Yao identity no doubt offered another connection drawing them
4
together. And as one of the asilikali recently returned from the Gold
5
Coast - a deployment Chilembwe had sharply criticized - the two may
have had much to discuss.
No doubt their views were not fully compatible, if not
diametrically opposed, and certainly their lives substantially diverged in
subsequent years. They probably never met again after mid-1905, when
Sergeant Juma departed Zomba for Nairobi, spending much of the next
decade deployed on various K.A.R. missions in Kenya and Somaliland.
And as his son suggests, Juma was on duty in wartime East Africa at the
time of Chilembwe’s Rising. But that would not be the extent of the
Chimwere family’s interactions with Chilembwe. Though he learned the
details only after returning, wounded, from the East African Campaign,
Juma became aware that Chilembwe’s abortive rebellion had placed his
family in danger. Assisting refugees fleeing the violence and who had
themselves been pursued by soldiers - whether K.A.R. recruits or
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European volunteers is unclear - their actions might well have placed
his family and Juma himself in grave danger. The refugees’ words -
“Chilembwe has caused us to be in trouble”- must have sharply resonated
with him. It’s no wonder he saw Chilembwe’s actions as “playing with
fire”! If the soldier and the missionary were, in fact, more than
acquaintances and truly friends, nothing in Juma’s character nor his son’s
recollections suggests he might have become the exception to
Shepperson’s conclusion that “Chilembwe … could not hope for any
mutiny amongst the native soldiers of the Protectorate.” Eschewing any
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anger he felt, however, Juma told his son “he wouldn’t have liked to kill”
Chilembwe, “but he wanted to arrest him” instead, and in so doing
fulfilling his duty as a British subject.

4
Regarding Chilembwe’s sense of identity, see Brian Morris, "The
Chilembwe Rebellion," The Society of Malawi Journal 68, 1(2015): 21.
George Shepperson and Thomas Price, Independent African: John
5
Chilembwe and the Nyasaland Rising of 1915 (Edinburgh: University Press,
1958): 133.
6
If the account relayed to Titus and his mother that “about a company” of
solders chased the refugees is accurate, it seems likely they may have
encountered the “force of about 150” soldiers and European volunteers
assembled by K.A.R. Captain Triscott in Zomba, rather than the “Mikalongwe
force of volunteers … [and] their tatterdemalion collection of native allies”
pressed into service to counter the rebellion or the later arriving K.A.R. double
company from Karonga; Shepperson and Price, 286, 310.
Shepperson and Price, 297.
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