“A Place Not Made by Hands”: Unsteady Formations of Nationalist Religiosities in Malawi ^†

Abstract

This article focuses on the Christian ecclesiastical footing and moorings of nationalist thought and pursuits within colonial Nyasaland and its postindependence iteration as the nation of Malawi. Attention is paid to foundational influences and the impact of European mission churches, beginning in the late 1800s, and three streams of American Christianity that influenced social development in Malawi: (1) historic African American Methodist and Baptist traditions; (2) Watchtower millenarianism; and (3) emerging mid-1900s expressions of predominantly white Pentecostal, charismatic, and evangelical Christianity. The article examines ways these European and American religious streams served as crucial catalysts for one or another form of African independency within the Malawi context, paying particular attention to the ways and degrees to which African innovations on Global North Christian expressions and paradigms proved disruptive to established authorities.

1. Introduction

Conceptions of peoplehood are almost never static. They form and reshape in response to evolving circumstances, drawing upon local and distant ideas in constructing vantage points on the people’s past, present, and future.

This is true of “African nationalism”, whose iterations have sprung from many sources and have coursed along a variety of strategic and philosophical streams and trajectories. From its initial forms in the late-19th century, African nationalism was concerned with greater African self-determination, sometimes through social resistance and sometimes social cooperation, but with an emphasis in general on facilitating African empowerment in the face of colonialism’s disruptions, dislocations, and disorientations of African life.

Speaking about factors animating nationalist frameworks within Central Africa, historian Robert Rotberg states, “The roots of nationalism within Central Africa are found in the rocky soil of British colonial rule.” Also, says Rotberg, it developed in “stages”:

[A]fter the first wave of resistance to white control there came a period during which Africans attempted to adapt themselves to the West—to accept its demands, to internalize those demands, and, in time, to realize what they construed as the benefits of the acculturation process. The concept of nationalism—of a redress of grievances—therefore did not spring full-blown into the minds of… African agitators. The entire course of colonial history in a sense favored the development of nationalism

(Rotberg 1965, pp. 1–2).

Indeed, desires for African independency and agency were at the heart of an African national vision within Malawi (which was known as Nyasaland until the mid-1900s). But African independency was pursued not only as a national political objective, but it was also pursued across the broader spectrum of Malawian cultural and institutional life—and it gained its initial institutional and cultural footing from (and within) the church sector within the country.

The arrival and fortifications of foreign missionaries, settlers, and colonial administrators within Nyasaland during the last decades of the 1800s and early decades of the 1900s created an existential crisis for local populations whose lifeworlds and worldviews were being undermined through soft and hard forms of colonial power. While there were local African populations that refused to accommodate themselves to these colonial impositions, others did, and with the latter potentially resulting in strong African alignments and affinities with the thought and practices of ecclesial and educational infrastructures put into place by the colonialists. Even where that was the case, though, persons socialized within these institutional sectors could potentially adapt the ideational and institutional resources of these realms toward objectives rooted more firmly in African independency, including forms with more explicit oppositional and insurgent intent.

The article here focuses on the Christian ecclesiastical footing and moorings of nationalist thought and pursuits within colonial Nyasaland and its postindependence iteration as the nation of Malawi. Attention is paid to foundational influences and impact of European mission churches, beginning in the late 1800s, with its varying consonances and dissonances in relation to local African life and culture. Primarily, the article is concerned with African accommodation and resistance in response to the mission and purposes of European Christianity, and with how evolving embodiments of Christianity (especially independent adaptations and innovations) intersected with constructions of nationalist thought and practice. Key moments and mobilizations along the road from missionary arrival to Malawian independence and postindependence development serve as windows on tensions between religion and politics, including the insurgent resistance of the John Chilembwe uprising, the institutional resistance of African independent church mobilizations, and the symbolic incorporations of both into the nationalist politics of the new Malawian nation.

In addition, three streams of Christianity emanating from the American context have also significantly impacted Malawian religion and politics (from the late 1800s forward), helping to nurture both political resistance forms and modern incorporationist forms of African independency. The three streams are as follows: (1) historic African American Methodist and Baptist traditions founded in the U.S. during the late 1700s and the 1800s that were rooted in black self-determinationist commitments; (2) Watchtower churches centering on millenarian doctrines of impending cataclysmic clashes between temporal forces of good and evil; and (3) emerging mid-1900s expressions of predominantly white Pentecostal, charismatic, and evangelical Christianity that emphasize Christian spiritual authority over the temporal realm. Each of these streams served at points along the way in Malawi’s long journey toward institutional and national self-determination as conceptual and material wellsprings for political resistance forms of independency, modern incorporationist forms, or both.

This article examines ways these American religious streams, as well as European missionary streams, served as crucial catalysts for one or another form of African independency within the Malawi context, paying particular attention to ways and the degrees to which African innovations on Global North Christian expressions and paradigms proved disruptive to “the political order or… basic teachings and practices of mission Christianity” (Forster and Banda 1999, p. 442).

2. Initial Clashes Between Missionary Christianity and African Religious Independency

Among the first churches to establish mission activities in Nyasaland were the Free Church of Scotland (with missionaries resident in the area by 1875) and Anglican Missionaries of the Universities Mission to Central Africa (whose efforts also began decades before the turn of the century) (Rotberg 1965, p. 6; Mbaya 2017, pp. 264–84). Other churches who were key mission presences in Nyasaland in the late-19th century were the Church of Scotland, the Seventh Day Adventists, the Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa, and the Catholic White Fathers. The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society arrived at the beginning of the 20th century, in 1908 (Linden 1974, p. 43; Cross 1978, p. 305).

Each of these key missionary groups had a distinctive impact on Nyasaland. The Free Church of Scotland was an especially dominant mission force in the territory, at least through the 1920s, owing to its ethos of free thinking and its superior educational initiatives. As Adrian Hastings notes, “the men of the Free Church had proudly withdrawn from the Church of Scotland in the ‘Disruption of 1843’, a fact which was by no means hidden from their [African] converts” (Hastings 1979, p. 257). A reformist spirit, therefore, was characteristic of the Free Church from its inception in what was then known as Nyasaland and was transmitted through its churches and, particularly, its educational institutions.

The most notable of its educational institutions was the Livingstonia Mission which, says Jahn McCracken, “combined to produce the most comprehensive educational system at a primary level and the most advanced of any in Central Africa in the upper grades” (McCracken 1968, p. 190). Elaborating on this, Ian Linden notes that, in 1897, the Livingstonia Mission “had seventy-eight bush schools plus the well-equipped Overtoun Institution which taught English and Theology to advanced student” (Linden 1974, p. 43). The Free Church’s Blantyre Mission operated 14 schools, including the Henry Henderson Institutes, founded in 1909, and its Domasi Mission ran eight schools (A. C. Ross 1996; Linden 1974, p. 43; McCracken 1968, p. 190). Additionally, says Linden, the Free Church could “boast the most impressive ‘cathedral’ in Central Africa” (Linden 1974, p. 43).

Although the reformist, self-determinationist spirit of Free Church missionaries encouraged pursuits of agency amongst the Africans they proselytized, there was a complex relationship on the part of Free Church missionaries (and missionaries from numerous denominations) between racism and anti-racism and paternalism and African empowerment (Ross and Fiedler 2022; K. R. Ross 2025). Several other early missionary groups were notable as well for aspects of their work with potential for encouraging African empowerment, including the Anglicans who brought an antislavery emphasis with their 19th-century efforts as well as a strong focus on education (Mbaya 2017, pp. 264–68). But, like the Free Church, the empowering aspects were offset by the proscriptive and paternalistic purposes of colonialism, and Africans were only free to think and act within prescribed limits. This was an important factor contributing over time to the independent directions in which African Christians moved.

Historian Harold Tuner defined African independent churches (AICs) as “founded in Africa, by Africans, and primarily for Africans” (Turner 1967, p. 17). At the same time, Turner quite cautiously suggested classifications of certain praxeological tendencies on the part of AICs, including individualistic or communal, and traditionalist, reformative, or radical (Turner 1967, p. 17). Peter Forster and Godfrey Banda show a similar reluctance with fixed AIC categories, acknowledging that most AICs and African religious independency movements do not fall neatly into existing classifications.

Some of the first indications of more independent African appropriations of Christianity within this territory occurred during the revivalist movements of 1895 to 1898, and then in 1903 to 1909. Thousands of Africans were reported to have attended these mass meetings, with “hundreds coming forward to be baptized” (McCracken 1968, p. 192). These revivalist trends, which derived in part from Free Church influences, intensified through the introduction of millenarian theologies within the region by the Watchtower Society. These early initiatives represented integrations taking place mainly at the cosmological level, as Christian concepts were presented at a mass level and, importantly, outside the control of mission institutions and mission-sanctioned spokesmen.

A subsequent, and more significant, phase of independency activity was less concerned with deviating from mission church doctrine and style than with creating institutions that were African-run and that were unrestricted and unequivocal in their modernizing efforts on the part of their African constituents. Most of these church founders were highly educated men trained during the late 1800s through Livingstonia Mission, including John Chilembwe, who also received training in an African America Baptist institution run by the National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc. (NBCUSA).

In 1900, Chilembwe returned to Nyasaland after completing his training in the U.S. and founded the Providence Industrial Mission (PIM), a combination of church and school, along the lines of the Tuskegee Institute within the U.S., and with financial support from the NBCUSA (Shepperson and Price 1958, p. 155). For the next 15 years, Chilembwe’s PIM enjoyed significant success within the Shire Highlands where it was based.

But, in 1915, Chilembwe helped launch a now-famous uprising within his region. Chilembwe was accused of masterminding what was a poorly defined and poorly organized attack by approximately 900 of his followers on white landowners in the Chiradzulu district of Nyasaland. The uprising expended most of its energies in its initial January 23 assault that resulted in the deaths of three local whites. Over the next few days, bands of Chilembwe followers took part in scattered attacks on local white people and on their property. By February 3, the uprising was effectively over, leaving 20 or more of the conspirators dead, including Chilembwe, and many more of Chilembwe’s followers under arrest (Shepperson and Price 1958, p. 268).

The uprising was influenced by a number of factors, including heightened government interference in local affairs through escalating taxation and land and wage insecurity through increasing European and East African immigration. A rise in hut taxes in 1912 depleted scarce revenues from African smallholder farming, and land availability for local farmers was increasingly threatened by a large immigration of African laborers from Portuguese East Africa and “a high density of European planters” (Linden and Linden 1971, p. 633).

What also fueled the uprising was the growing influence within the region of millenarian teachings, primarily through the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society. Millenarian frameworks envision a cataclysmic end to the present age, brought about as a result of and a divine response to culminations of rampant human perversity within society. Having declared the present order wicked, millenarianists have tended to deny existing social orders any legitimacy, often leading to their withdrawal from social and political matters and sometimes to a commitment to overthrowing the perverse order. Both the quietism of the former viewpoint and the activism of the latter have led to confrontations between Christians and social authorities, including within pre- and postindependence Malawi.

A noted millenarian proponent within the Nyasaland territory was Elliot Kamwana, documented as having baptized approximately 10,000 persons within a few-month period of 1909 within the Livingstonia area (Shepperson and Price 1958, p. 155). Kamwana preached “the coming in Octboer 1914 of the new age…[and that]… Christ would come, all the whites would have to leave the country, and there would be no more oppression from tax-gatherers” (Shepperson and Price 1958, p. 155). Watchtower influence also spread in the region through the maverick English missionary, Joseph Booth, Chilembwe’s former teacher and mentor who established the Zambesi Industrial Mission in the Shire Highlands of central Nyasaland in 1892 and who also published a book in 1897 titled “Africa for the Africans.”1 Shortly thereafter, the British expelled Booth from Nyasaland and he moved to South Africa, from which he was also expelled after Chilembwe’s 1915 uprising due to suspicions that he helped influence Chilembwe’s radicalism (Lipschutz and Rasmussen 2015).

Although Watchtower millenarianism had become strongly rooted in the central parts of Nyasaland where Booth and Chilembwe operated and in northern Nyasaland where Kamwana was based, the relationship between millenarian thought and African independency frameworks has been widely debated. Historians George Shepperson and Thomas Price argue that Chilembwe’s intentions were essentially reformist, noting he was committed to the modern ideals he had learned from his exposure to Europeans and Americans, while lamenting how little these ideals were reflected in the actions and institutions of the colonialists. According to Shepperson and Price, Chilembwe’s rebellion would close the gap between principle and practice by fulfilling one of two roles:

…first, if successful, the creation of an African state in Nyasaland with strongly theocratic elements and selected European guidance; second, if unsuccessful, a gesture of protest, in early months of the new and frightening war [World War I], against what were conceived as the intolerable aspects of European rule

(Shepperson and Price 1958, p. 255).

Shepperson and Price clearly accorded the Chilembwe uprising a proto-nationalist interpretation. They argued though that he had no prophetic ambitions or millenarian intentions, and concluded he was one of the first forward-looking, inter-tribal modern African leaders. Historians Jane and Ian Linden disagree with this interpretation, taking issue with Shepperson and Price’s emphasis on Chilembwe’s nationalist qualities while disassociating him from millenarianism. Drawing on evidence from an official inquiry of Chilembwe’s uprising (unavailable to Shepperson and Price 1958), Linden and Linden point to Chilembwe’s millenarian motivations and those of his followers. They point to “strong circumstantial evidence that Chilembwe was profoundly influenced by millenarian expectations,” while also emphasizing the importance of explaining “why almost nine hundred Africans rose in armed rebellion.” According to Linden and Linden, “To answer this more important question it is necessary to return to Kamwana and Watchtower, and the spectrum of belief about the coming of the millennium” (Linden and Linden 1971, p. 641). What Kamwana provided for Chilembwe’s followers and others across the region, they say, was an “articulate expression of a widespread, more inchoate sense of impending catastrophe” (Linden and Linden 1971, p. 647).

Linden and Linden’s analysis goes much further than Shepperson and Price’s in examining how movement followers viewed the leader (rather than simply how the leader (Chilembwe) may have envisioned his own motives and actions. Linden and Linden argue that Chilembwe’s followers likely viewed Chilembwe’s leadership through a cosmological orientation shaped by interpretations of their social hardships as manifestations of end-times spiritual evil, with Chilembwe’s call to arms against white landholders ushering in the cataclysmic battle of good against evil. In addition, Chilembwe may have embodied a requisite symbolic authority in the eyes of his followers that derived from the status attached to his American education and backing (especially since, in both instances, these were African American sources). The significance of the latter, in this instance, derived from the prevalence of “cargo cult” myths operative in early-20th-century Nyasaland, which claimed that African Americans were to come by plane to deliver Africans from white domination and provide Africans with material goods (Shepperson 1970, pp. 235–36). Consequently, to the extent that the white authorities had come to be defined as the cause of increasingly anomic conditions within the context, Chilembwe’s call to rebel against them was viewed by his followers as attacking evil at its source. In the eyes of his followers, then, Chilembwe embodied both social leadership capital and symbolic leadership capital as an American-connected and biblically affirming harbinger of the promised new age.

3. Traditionalist Versus Modernist Tensions Within African Religious Nationalism

There was an understandable inactivity in religious independency activity in the decade immediately following the telling put-down of the Chilembwe movement and the shutdown of his PIM. Nevertheless, independency energies reemerged soon after, beginning with descendants of the revivalist and Watchtower strands which had initiated the earlier phase of millenarian-oriented independency. This subsequent phase was less concerned with cosmological matters than with an African-directed process of modernist institution building.

For example, the Last Church of God and His Christ was founded in 1923 by Jordan Msumba, a former student of Livingstonia Mission and then a Watchtower minister for a period thereafter. In founding the Last Church, Msumba was partly concerned with combining “western and African traditional practices” by permitting polygamy and beer drinking (Kalinga 1982, p. 210). By 1940, the church had acquired about 7000 members. A church which similarly defied European missionary condemnations of polygamy was the Chipangano Church, founded by Isaac Kaunda in 1930 near the town of Chinteche. The Chipangano Church promoted the view that “polygamy is not contrary to Christian teaching”, which was a message the congregation conveyed to approximately 11,000 persons in the area that were reached by this ministry within its first ten years (MacDonald 1970a, p. 121).

Another independent church with an African nationalist emphasis was the African National Church, organized in 1929 by two former Livingstonia Mission colleagues, Paddy Nyasulu and Isaac Mkondowe. The church operated as many as five schools by the mid-1930s and reported a membership of 3000 by 1940 (Kalinga 1982, p. 217; MacDonald 1970a, p. 112). Its ongoing support for traditionalist aspects such as polygyny, however, was a source of tension for members inclined toward Western and modernist orthodoxies (Parratt 1978, p. 201).

The PIM was able to restart in 1926, and was headed by Daniel Malikebu, a theologically trained clergyman who was the first Nyasalander to obtain a medical degree (Parratt 1979, p. 186). PIM’s direction under Malikebu’s leadership could be considered a reinvigoration of a stream of Christianity within Nyasaland, where progress was measured by its socialization and institutionalization in a Western direction—but as an African version, in contrast to initial missionary expressions.

Another influential example of this trajectory, organized in the late 1920s and, like the PIM, with African American connections, was the Central Province branch of the U.S.-based African Methodist Episcopal Church. The A.M.E. branch in Nyasaland was headed by a former member of the Church of Scotland Mission, Hanock Phiri (Parratt 1979, p. 192). Phiri was introduced to the A.M.E. Church through its South African branch, as was his nephew, Hastings Kamuzu Banda, who became one of the central leaders of anticolonial nationalism in Nyasaland and, subsequently, the first President after its independence as the newly named nation of Malawi. But Phiri laid the groundwork, inspired by tales of the Tuskegee Institute and other African American higher education institutions, and by independent African American denominations, such as the A.M.E. Church (Engel 2015, p. 257). Under Phiri’s leadership, the A.M.E. Central Province branch grew to thousands of members and operated several schools that served hundreds of local children (MacDonald 1970b, pp. 75–87). These schools, though, while born of an independency spirit, benefited from a degree of alignment with “Africa-wide colonial education” initiatives and the westernizing and modernizing objectives of those initiatives (Engel 2015, p. 257). The same could be said of the westernizing and modernizing benefits of alignment with an African American denomination.

Shortly after the A.M.E. Central Province founding, a church called the African Reformed Presbyterian Church was formed in Northern Nyasaland in 1932 by Yaphet Mkandawire, a Free Church of Scotland minister (Parratt 1979, p. 186). The African Reformed Presbyterian Church was the first of three independency-minded churches organized by Livingstonia Mission graduates that would merge into one church in 1935. The other two churches were the Eklesia Lanengwa Church (translated, Christianity of Freedom) that was started in 1934 by Charles Chinula, and the Blackman’s Church (also known as Mpingo wa Afipa wa Africa), formed in 1933 by Yesaya Mwasi. The three churches, after merging in 1935, operated under Mwasi’s leadership and church name. As historian John Parrett argues, the aim of Mwasi and of the now-enlarged Blackman’s Church was “to set up a genuinely African Church, not separating itself from the mainstream of historic Christianity, but …[rather]…from the entanglements of European control” (Ndekha 2015; Parratt 1978, p. 205). Its mid-1930s church membership of approximately 3400 likely operated within quite an independent religious space, but its primary school and three-year theological college may have been a bit more reliant upon external (mainly Western) funding sources.

At least two churches started during the late 1930s and early 1940s that took more confrontational political tactics against the colonial government. One was the Ana a Mulungu church (translated, Sons of God), organized in 1934 by Wilfred Gudu, a former Seventh Day Adventist teacher and former Watchtower member from the Cholo District (now Thyolo), educated as a child in a primary school run by African American missionaries (Parratt 1979, p. 196). By 1935, the formation of Ana a Mulungu led also to the development of a broader village in which the church’s members lived, called Ziyoni ya Yehova (Zion of Jehovah), where members built their own houses and created a local economy centered on agriculture and artisanry. As a young adult, Gudu began teaching in rural Seventh Day Adventist schools, where he became quite resistant to school policies that infringed upon African cultural agency and self-determination (Ndekha 2015). This was a preface to his open defiance of government policies years later as pastor of Ana a Mulungu, most notably through his declaration in 1938 that neither he nor his followers would again pay taxes to the British kingdom, resulting in the arrest of Gudu and some of his followers (Rotberg 1965, p. 153). After serving four years in prison, Gudu resumed his ministry activities at Ana a Mulungu, and broadened its regional reach. In the mid-1940s, Gudu and his Ana a Mulungu followers again challenged colonial authorities’ efforts to impose land use policies on their village, and Gudu was relocated away from Ziyoni ya Yehova by the authorities (Ndekha 2015).

A similarly confrontational church, Mpingo wa Makolo Achikuda (Church of the Black Ancestors), was founded in the 1940s by Peter Nyambo. Like Chilembwe, Nyambo received his education as a youth at Booth’s Zambezi Industrial Mission, where he too was influenced by Booth’s promotion of African self-determination. In 1902, Nyambo switched from the Baptist denomination of his earlier years to Seventh Day Adventist, with his convictions about Saturday sabbath apparently influencing his Baptist mentor Booth to switch as well. That same year, Booth converted a second mission he had previously founded, the Plainfield Mission (south of Blantyre), to a Seventh Day Adventist mission, where he resided, with Nyambo joining him there in 1903. The following year, Booth facilitated Nyambo’s enrollment in a mission training school in Wales, where Nyambo matriculated until leaving Europe for Kenya in 1906, where he founded a mission near Mombosa. In 1907, Nyambo left Kenya for Nyasaland, where he returned to the Plainfield Mission (now renamed Malamulo), and which had been headed in recent years by African American Seventh Day Adventist missionaries, Thomas Branch and Joel Rogers. By 1911, Nyambo was expressing growing dissatisfaction with a lack of African cultural rootedness on the part of Adventist missions. After being elected Secretary of the British Christian Union of Central Africa (an ecumenical group founded in 1896 by Booth), Nyambo moved in 1912 to South Africa, connecting with Booth there, and adding to a list of Nyasaland clergy (including Chilembwe, Kamwana, and Msumba) who joined Booth at some point in relative exile within South Africa. In South Africa, Nyambo began writing anticolonial publications, including newspaper articles and a widely circulated petition called “Rhodesia Nyasaland Appeal.” It has been argued that the “signing and transmission of this petition were the seeds that informed the Nyasaland Insurgency” orchestrated a few years later by Chilembwe.2

This 1940s thrust of overtly political ministries, as represented by Gudu and Nyambo, signaled a pivot from what historian John McCracken labels “the betterment” era of African development within Nyasaland to what would become a more secular political nationalism. The organizational catalyzing of much of this came through the Nyasaland African Congress (NAC), which was founded in 1944 and served as “the first political organization in Central Africa [operating] on a territorial-wide basis.” As McCraken notes further, the NAC’s emergence ushered in a nationalist era considered to be “one of the most united and well organized in east and central Africa” (McCracken 1968, pp. 203, 206). NAC’s 20-year mobilization culminated in the achievement of national independence in 1964, transitioning thereafter into Malawi’s postindependence ruling party, the Malawi Congress Party (MCP), and the 30-year presidency and MCP leadership of Hastings Kamuzu Banda.

4. Postindependence Political Nationalism and Broader Streams of Church Independency

The African betterment and empowerment energies of the pre-1960s church independency movement carried forward into the post-independent context, confronting a new set of complexities and possibilities in church relations with the newly established Malawian state. Initially, both the African betterment and the political resistance streams of church independency found common ground with the now-African-run state.

The African betterment church independency streams moved mainly in cooperative directions with the Malawian state. In these instances, Malawian Christians whose emphasis had been placed on modernizations of African educational activities, economic pursuits, and political processes, but on authentically African terms, saw in the new nationalist government a culmination of those hopes and aspirations.

In general, compatibilities were great between the nationalist government and the African betterment stream of Malawian Christianity (which included both independency-oriented Christians committed to modernization and mainline missionary stream Christians committed to African indigenization of church life). An indicator of affinities within this church stream toward the new government was systematic church compliance with MCP policies and mandates and large-scale MCP membership by church members. For example, this spirit of church cooperation was illustrated by the Last Church of God and His Christ, whose policy during and after the colonial era was to avoid preaching “doctrines subversive to the government”. Moreover, Last Church officials gave explicit instructions to church members to “buy Malawi Congress Party cards, to pay tax if eligible, and to be obedient to party, government, and chiefs” (Forster and Banda 1999, p. 457).

President Banda and MCP officials were also alert to potential affinities with the Malawian churches, especially the independency-minded churches, often invoking the memory of earlier pioneers of anticolonial religious resistance (McCracken 1968, p. 205). Additionally, as Forster and Banda note, President Banda conveyed his sympathies with resistance churches through political rhetoric in which he “regularly attacked the ways in which Europeans had despised African culture… [and] missionaries often were his prime targets.” Also instructive in this regard was that President Banda briefly “switched his allegiance from Presbyterianism to the African Methodist Episcopal Church” (a church historically connected to political resistance in colonial Nyasaland and in its American homeland) and he also gave “limited but regular financial support to an offshoot from Presbyterianism known as Eklezia Lonangwa” (Forster and Banda 1999, p. 457).

Celebrated ties between anticolonial churches and MCP freedom fighters during the colonial era and ongoing symbolic invocations by postindependence MCP officials of those previous anticolonial church leaders and of the political alliances forged during those times tended to mute mainline and modernist church pushback against the MCP postindependence government. Church historian Qeko Jere argues that, due to the closeness churches had to the anticolonial liberation movement, the Malawian church found itself largely unable to “criticize the same people with whom it worked in the liberation process.” Instead, says Jere, “the church remained silent for three decades of oppression, suffering, nepotism, segregation, and every manner of regional way of life” (Jere 2018, p. 96).

In an article titled “Where were the prophets and martyrs in Banda’s Malawi?”, historian Kenneth Ross brings greater detail and nuance to the critique of church relations to government during the Banda regime (K. R. Ross 1996b, pp. 113–28). Ross cites the educational connections of many nationalist movement and future MCP leaders to Presbyterian mission schools as one of the factors constraining church criticism of the MCP government (particularly from within Presbyterian circles). Ross also points to the MCP’s oppressive capacities and proclivities as another factor constraining church criticisms of government. Nonetheless, he pushes against over-simplifications of the church’s political positioning within postindependence Malawi, stating the following:

Like all other national institutions the churches were co-opted to support the Banda dictatorship and, to the casual observer, they appeared to be offering unquestioning ‘legitimation to the one-party system… Such an assessment of the churches’ social witness during the one party period is becoming the conventional wisdom but does it do justice to a complex issue

(K. R. Ross 1996b, p. 115).

Ross argues, instead, that the church was “not quite so silent and compromised as might first appear” and, also, “there were serious limitations to its capacity to address the gospel message to the contemporary political situation” (K. R. Ross 1996b, p. 115). In support of that argument, Ross details political resistance embodied by four prominent Presbyterian clergymen during the Banda years, three of whom served in succession from the 1960s through the 1990s as General Secretary of the Church of Central Africa Presbyterian (CCAP), and all of whom operated largely in isolation of the broader CCAP family in their critiques of MCP governance. A key insight from Ross’s analysis is that open opposition by churches to the Banda regime, even when emanating from individuals in the central leadership of mainstream churches, was in most instances a peripheral part of the larger religio-political ecology within Malawi.

The religious independency movement was in some respects a reverse image of mainstream churches in its potentialities as a political oppositional force. In contrast to the overall insider, conventional positioning of mainstream churches, a defining characteristic of independency churches and movements was their outsider, unconventional positioning. Religious independency’s broader pool of oppositionality might have been expected to generate widespread and regularized resistance toward entrenched authority structures, especially where those structures of status quo authority were aggressively imposed. But despite their overall cultural oppositional moorings, open opposition to governmental authorities by independency churches and movements, much like the mainstream churches, was only a peripheral part of their broader operational trajectories. Independent churches may have expressed less enthusiasm than mainstream churches toward the MCP government and its purported embodiments of anticolonial and African empowerment traditions, but this lack of political enthusiasm within religious independency realms rarely translated into open opposition to the Banda regime.

While the independent church sector and mainline Protestant mission churches settled on active or passive compliance with the Banda regime, it would be Malawi’s Catholic bishops, speaking through the official ecclesial channel of a Pastoral Letter issued in 1992, who would most openly challenge and defy the Banda regime and its expanded dominance of Malawian society. The letter from the bishops, titled “Living Our Faith”, systematically and compellingly addressed Malawi’s massive income, educational, and health care inequalities and the additional immoralities of a one-party political system that had closed off possibilities for citizen political discussion, action, and organizing outside the bounds of pro-MCP ideological and procedural space.

The bishop’s Pastoral Letter was a bombshell, reverberating throughout Malawian society and throughout the ranks and corridors of the MCP power structure. Within days of the issuing of the Pastoral Letter, the MCP convened a special session of party officials, which resulted in a formal MCP condemnation of the Catholic bishops and in declaring possession of the Pastoral Letter to be a crime resulting in severe punishment. Moreover, the bishops were politically targeted, including calls in some quarters for their execution and the actual deportation of one of the signers, Monsignor John Roche (Beck and Hendon 1992; K. R. Ross 1996a, p. 40).

The 1992 Pastoral Letter was also viewed as a turning point in postindependence Malawian politics and the beginning of the end of the MCP’s stranglehold on Malawian society. In discussing the “dramatic shift in power” the Pastoral Letters helped bring about, Ross notes the following:

The bishops’ polite but blunt statements about the shortcomings of the prevailing political order had such a ring of truth that the MCP regime was suddenly exposed. Things could never be the same again. Practically overnight the mode of discourse in everyday conversation began to change. The once all-powerful MCP was becoming a laughing stock. Liberation was palpable

(K. R. Ross 1996a, p. 39).

Emboldened by the Catholic Pastoral Letter, other religious groups and civil society organizations began openly speaking out against the MCP government and mobilizing for change. By late 1992, the MCP’s hold on power was noticeably slipping, moving by mid-1993 to a loss of control of both the political narrative and of the political process. One indicator of the MCP’s diminishing hold over the populace was that a widening number of Malawians were boldly voicing by 1993 that “John Chilembwe—not Kamazu Banda—was the father of Malawian politics” (K. R. Ross 1996a, p. 45). This repudiation of MCP’s longstanding self-designation as the ongoing standard bearer of the anticolonial nationalism undermined a key tenet on which MCP staked its political legitimation.

But the loss of MCP narrative control was evident not only in its redirections of symbolic capital but also in the late-1992 emergence and 1993 expansion of a popular dialogue forum that came to be known as the “Public Affairs Committee”. This was a national advocacy collaborative in which many key civil society organizations formally participated, including mainstream denominations such as the Central Church of Africa Presbyterian and the Anglican Church; historically oppositional churches such as the A.M.E. Church, Seventh Day Adventists, and Providence Industrial Mission; the Roman Catholic Church; and Muslim networks. The Public Affairs Committee’s national mobilizations of popular-level political dialogue and advocacy empowered the populace and provided a basis for direct dialogue with the MCP government on matters related to political reform. This led initially to a 1993 national referendum vote on multiparty democracy, which the electorate approved in large numbers. This was followed in 1994 by multiparty national elections and the end of MCP control of national politics (K. R. Ross 1996a, pp. 4–45).

The oppositional spirit of Chilembwe and colonial-era religious independency expressions possessed enduring impact across decades of Banda rule, before its second-round usage as an oppositional resource against unwelcome political imposition (in the form of Banda’s authoritarian rule) receded once again into the background. It would be eclipsed, once again, by a new regimen of nationalist promises and assurances of African social progress and empowerment.

5. Church and State in the Post-Banda Political Era

As momentous as the 1992–1994 period was in reshaping Malawian politics and in affirming the potentially prophetic role of religious leaders and institutions, and as strategic as the 1992 Pastoral Letter by Catholic bishops was to that process, ongoing vigilance by religious leaders was needed in championing justice and democratic freedoms and in ensuring theological integrity in church public square leadership and engagement.

The election of a new president and ruling party in 1994, Bakili Muluzi and the United Democratic Front (UDF), was an opportunity to renegotiate the relationship between the faith and governmental sectors. Although Banda’s efforts over 30 years to silence and coopt the faith sector in furtherance of his autocratic rule eventually gave way to open hostilities between the two sectors, Muluzi looked for ways to ally the two sectors in mutual support of democratic freedoms and principles. During the runup to the 1994 elections, Muluzi, as initial chair of the newly formed UDF, publicly lauded churches for their strategic role in the pivot away from authoritarianism to multiparty democracy (Jere and Magezi 2018, pp. 44–45). Nonetheless, Malawian scholars Qeko Jere and Vhumani Magezi outline several delicate and complicating aspects of religious involvement in this emerging Malawian public square arena:

For the churches, adaptation to the new role as power broker did not come without challenges. On the one hand, some church leaders became so involved in the political arena that they eventually left the ministry in order to devote themselves to politics… On the other hand, there were those who believed that the churches became too detached from the political process in the post-referendum period… thus leaving the process of reform entirely in the hands of the political parties

(Jere and Magezi 2018, p. 45).

What was clear, at the very least, is that there was receptivity by the UDF government to churches functioning as a moral conscience within public affairs. As Jere and Magezi observed, “When Bakili Muluzi accepted the office of presidency he immediately invited the churches to offer correction to his government whenever it might stray from the path” (Jere and Magezi 2018, p. 48).

It was not long, however, until these cross-sector elite commitments to democracy came to be viewed as little more than window dressing for a system whose undemocratic and inegalitarian tendencies had changed very little. Popular-level distrust of the new social order and of the political and religious elites endorsing it increased, chipping away at the anticolonial nationalist heritage the Muluzi government was presumed to embody. Popular trust faded in both the political and religious reinforcements of UDF nationalism, including claims within contemporary Malawian politics to continuities with historic religio-political nationalist traditions. Instead, with political (and religious) elites evidencing some of the same autocratic tendencies of the Banda regime, and against which they had fought, popular skepticism increased about the ability of Malawi’s political and religious institutions to overcome their deep-seated undemocratic cultural tendencies (Jere and Magezi 2018, pp. 48–51).

Meanwhile, memories of the powerful anticolonial nationalist moment embodied by Chilembwe a century earlier had faded in importance. Three decades of Banda’s autocratic rule and a decade of democratic disappointments under Muluzi’s rule seemed to point in no way to the stream of independency signaled by the Chilembwe insurgency. Muluzi’s presidential successor, Bingu wa Mutharika, brought about another near-decade of democratic vacillations from 2004 until his unexpected death in 2012. Although an outspoken critic of the Banda regime and one of the UDF founders in the 1990s, Mutharika’s presidency (after a promising start) contributed significantly to Malawi’s trajectory of democratic decline. In fact, Mutharika’s second term in office (beginning in 2009) was viewed as a reversion to some of Banda’s more draconian antidemocratic measures, including an intolerance of criticism from civil society leaders and from official within his own government, and a turn toward jailing dissenters and a “directive to state security organs to use all force necessary to halt protests” (Kimenyi 2012).

After decades of fraught postindependence governance, much of anticolonial nationalism’s luster had worn off, at least in any associations with it that these postindependence regimes may have tried to create along the way. The modernist African capacity-building nationalist instincts remained strong, but ideological departures from the more vitriolic anticolonial paradigm led to increased divergences between these two streams throughout the post-independent years. Chilembwe’s historic anticolonial nationalism and internationalist connections to the oppositional religious instincts inherent within 19th-century and early-20th-century African American churches and their higher education institutions may have continued to hover in powerful ways over Malawi’s postindependence politics, but more remotely, and with greater political distortion.

Nevertheless, self-determined forms of anticolonial African independency Christianity still existed throughout the later 20th century and beyond, including ongoing expressions of Chilembwe’s Providence Industrial Mission (with a 1982 membership of 25,000), Mwasi’s Blackman’s Church (with an early-1980s membership of roughly 500), and Nyambo’s Church of the Black Ancestors (with a 1970 membership estimated at “over 5000 adults, affiliated to more than sixty congregations in six chiefdoms”) (Barrett 1982, p. 471; Schoffeleers 1985, p. 26). The anticolonial critique by the Church of the Black Ancestors actually grew more sharp-edged after Malawian independence than it had been under Nyambo during the colonial era. Among the church’s later-20th-century teachings was that “Christianity is an alien religion which has no relevance for Africa, except that it has been used as an instrument of subjection” and that the Bible is “a Book of the Whites” (Schoffeleers 1985, pp. 21–22).

Postindependence politicians, scrambling after political support among Malawi’s overwhelmingly Christian population, would not really have wanted much to do with these kinds of teachings, nor would they have been so quick to tout Chilembwe’s perspectives if they were properly interpreting Chilembwe’s uprising (in all of its millenarian cataclysmic radicality). Clearly, anticolonial African religious independency was losing its ideological influences upon Malawian popular consciousness, due to its symbolic manipulations by contemporary politicians, and its own sometimes radically counter-mainstream ideological potentialities.

But even as these anticolonial traditions of religiously influenced nationalism were losing touch with mainstream religious consciousness within Malawi (as remnants partly of earlier American millenarian and African American antiracist religious traditions), American religious influences of another kind were expanding and defining national purpose in somewhat different terms. By the 1960s, American evangelical, Pentecostal, and charismatic churches were sweeping into every region of sub-Saharan Africa, and Central and Southern Africa seemed to be especially fertile ground.

Unlike East and West African nations where there was greater numerical parity between Christian and Muslim populations, Central and Southern African nations were characterized by a numerical preponderance of Christians (with the Christian population in most African nations south of the equator numbering at least 60 percent by the mid- to late 20th century). Also, South Africa’s dominance within the region as a heavily westernized, modernized, and racialized country, anchored the Southern–Central regions in cultural atmospheres favorable for navigation by American evangelical, Pentecostal, and charismatic Christians with limited African missionary experience. The influx of mid- to late-20th-century American missionaries was aided as well by greater access to mass communication technologies, including radio, television, and, later, the internet.

There was Pentecostal and evangelical presence in Malawi prior to this later wave, such as the Assemblies of God denomination (which arrived in Nyasaland in 1930) and the Apostolic Faith Church (arriving in 1933). The American missionary arrivals in Central Africa during the 1960s through 1990s were much more diverse in their ecclesial identities and formats. For example, within late-20th-century Zambia (Malawi’s immediate neighbor), half of the 22 denominations and half of the 40 para-church organizations operating there at the time had arrived between the 1960s and 1980s (Smith 1999, pp. 535–36, 548–50). Moreover, data on missionaries present in Zambia at the end of the 20th century show that 200 of these missionaries were from the U.S. (as compared with 50 from the U.K., the next largest group) (Johnstone et al. 2001, p. 420). Most of the American missionaries were affiliated with evangelical, Pentecostal, and charismatic groups.

In Malawi, according to this same turn-of-the-century data, evangelicals numbered 2.28 million (growing annually at 10.5 percent), charismatic Christians numbered 1.76 million (growing annually by 13 percent), and Pentecostals numbered 699,000 (growing annually at 27 percent). Taken together, evangelical, charismatic, and Pentecostal Christians comprised 43 percent of Malawi’s 8.8 million practicing Christians (Johnstone et al. 2001, p. 420). Into the 21st century, these categories of Christians have maintained their numerical strength, an indicator of which being The Evangelical Association of Malawi, which is “an umbrella organization of 130 members (74 Church Denominations and 56 Christian Organisations) spread across all the 28 districts of Malawi; representing about 4.2 million people of the country’s 17.5 million” (Evangelical Association of Malawi 2025) This is within a nation where an estimated 81 percent of its early-21st-century population identified as Christian (Association of Religion Data Archives 2025).

The growth of evangelical, charismatic, and Pentecostal mission activities within the postindependence era increasingly exposed Malawians to a range of abundance theologies with roots in American Christianity. Paul Gifford’s scholarship on African religion and public life singles out economic prosperity doctrines as a primary variant (Gifford 1990, p. 374; 1991, p. 50), but Christian abundance theologies have taken other forms as well, including “word of faith” doctrines, and, in more grandiose fashion, Christian dominion theologies, which stress a Christian calling and capacity for bringing all of society, including politics and economics, into conformity with scripture.

Gifford emphasizes American church promotional capacities as a crucial aspect of the rapid spread of abundance theologies within Africa, but scholars caution against over-emphasizing the role of external factors and actors at the expense of necessary attention to internal African dynamics contributing to the embrace and expansion of Christian frameworks. Marthie Momberg outlines a quite nuanced relationship between dynamics internal and external to Africa driving contemporary African innovations on abundance theology themes:

The more recent development of urban-centred and prosperity-preaching Pentecostals is inspired by North American televangelism, but African Pentecostalism should not be confused with the North American movement. As with African Independent Churches, they are independent of Western mission denominations. They are not only indigenous in their capacity to mobilise resources and leadership, but also incorporate cosmological symbols that relate, for example, to the power of the mystic spirit world”

(Momberg 2023, p. 3).

Although not explicitly addressing abundance theologies, Philip Jenkins offers another reason such theologies could potentially appeal to African Christians—specifically, a belief in the immediacy of biblically displayed supernatural power and the ability to deploy those same powers to alter and transform temporal and material conditions today. Jenkins points to the great interest by many African Christians in “supernatural elements of scripture, such as miracles, visions, and healings.” For the many Africans who read the Bible from that vantage point, “ideas of supernatural warfare and healing need not the slightest explanation, and certainly no apology” (Jenkins 2006, pp. 4, 7). Those perspectives have served as helpful resources to Africans navigating the challenges and distresses of poverty and social opportunity scarcity, providing a sense of clarity and agency in navigating these social difficulties and uncertainties.

Within abundance theology frameworks, and within many evangelical, Pentecostal, and charismatic frameworks more broadly, difficulties and challenges are regarded as proving grounds, opportunities to demonstrate the power of faith and the ultimacy of spirit over temporal circumstances. From that standpoint, the emphasis should not be on decrying temporal conditions and circumstances in ways that concede control and agency through the resignations of social withdrawal or the defiances of protest and oppositional stances. Rather, the emphasis should be on overcoming the presumed limitations of the visible world through an attitude resting on faith in God’s sovereignty and (certainly, for proponents of abundance theologies) the belief that God has given believers dominion over the earth. Extrapolated further, the impediments to African betterment are viewed in these instances to be more internal than external, more attitudinal than structural, more spiritual than social.

It was this modernist–betterment variant, tied more to westernism (and specifically, to Americanism), that was ascending in symbolic nationalist importance in later-20th-century and early-21st-century Malawi. This approach achieved notable heights with the 2020 election of Lazarus McCarthy Chakwera as Malawi’s president. Prior to his election, Chakwera had served as an Assemblies of God pastor and seminary instructor, and as the denomination’s national president in Malawi. It is important to note, as well, that Chakwera received a doctoral degree in theology from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, a leading theological seminary within the moderate wing of American evangelicalism. Chakwera’s international ecclesial ties shaped his leadership vision and approach and contributed to his rise to his denomination’s national leadership and then to Malawi’s national political leadership.

First of all, Chakwera’s international experience and doctoral degree imprimatur confirmed his modernist orientation and his bona fides as an achiever along trajectories of honor. His demonstrated record of honorable achievement also lent credence to central message thematics which focused on individual and collective opportunity and possibilities for progress when guided by expansiveness in vision and integrity in action. After what many Malawians perceived to be almost 60 years of political leadership disappointments, Chakwera struck a chord of hope for many across the country as evidenced by his defeat of the incumbent president. Chakwera’s inaugural address captures some of the spirit in the air:

It is no secret that we have had one administration after another shifting its post to the next election, promising prosperity but delivering poverty; promising nationalism but delivering division; promising political tolerance but delivering human rights abuses; promising good governance but delivering corruption; promising institutional autonomy but delivering state capture… The ruining of national treasures of both nature and state is a sin of my generation that I am bound by God to confess and bound by you to correct

(Trinity Evangelical Divinity School 2025).

Chakwera was not the first of Malawi’s presidents able to point to professional distinctions obtained beyond the realm of politics. Afterall, Banda had led the way as a physician whose overseas education included advanced high school studies at Wilberforce Institute (an historically black institution in Ohio); a bachelor’s degree from University of Chicago; and medical degrees from Meharry Medical College (a historically black school in Tennessee) and from the University of Edinburgh. Bakili Muluzi completed his university studies in England at the Bolton College of Education and then at the Thisted College of Further Education in Denmark, before returning to Malawi and rising up the MCP ranks to several ministerial posts during Banda’s reign (Encyclopedia.Com 2025). Muthurika earned a bachelor’s degree from Shri Ram College of Commerce, in Delhi, India; a Master of Arts degree in economics from the Delhi School of Economics; and a PhD degree in Development Economics from Pacific Western University in California. Muthurika’s successor, Joyce Banda, who was the first woman elected president in Malawi, earned a Master of Arts degree in Leadership from Royal Roads University in Canada; was the founder of national charitable and professional organizations in Malawi, including the Joyce Banda Foundation; and received an honorary doctorate in 2013 from Jeonju University. Her presidential election took place after Muthurika’s death halfway through his second term, and her presidency ended two years later when she was defeated in the regularly scheduled national elections by Muthurika’s brother, Peter Muthurika. Peter Muthurika had an extensive overseas educational background, including a bachelor’s degree in law from the University of London; a Master of Laws degree and Doctor of Juridical Science degree from Yale University; and faculty positions at distinguished universities in Tanzania, Ethiopia, the United Kingdom, and the United States prior to his election as Malawi’s president.

Clearly, Malawi’s presidents were persons of great accomplishment and distinction—well before they were elected into the presidency. But in each instance, the promise suggested in the vastness of their leadership profiles did not fully manifest through their statecraft. For Chakwera, the missing ingredient was a proper and full activation of religion within the public square and the reaffirmation and reinforcement of faith imperatives within all aspects of collective and personal life. Although each of Chakwera’s predecessors were persons with strong religion sector associations, Chakwera was not interested in religion as simply an overlay in political life; Chakwera viewed religion and politics as “inseparable,” as argued in a book called Religion and Politics, written by Chakwera’s son, Rev. Nick Chakwera, and publicly lauded by the president (Nyasa Times 2024).

President Chakwera makes his own views about the symbiosis between religion and politics clear, where in reflecting upon his path into politics, he stated the following:

God spoke to my heart… He said, “I am not pulling you out of ministry. Instead, I am extending your ministry. I want you to get into politics”

(Trinity Evangelical Divinity School 2025).

Although Chakwera distances himself from any theocratic implications, he goes a long way toward suggesting that within his presidency the faith sector and governmental sector are of one mind in their operations and should not yield to suggestions of distinctions and difference between them. Alluding to directives and promptings from Chakwera, the general secretary of the Blantyre Synod of the Church of Central Africa Presbyterian, Reverend Billy Gama, declared at an official gathering of synod officials that the synod would not be following its pattern of issuing Pastoral Letters because “the Synod’s General Administrative Committee and the majority said the pastoral letter was not necessary” since there was “no need to issue a pastoral letter when the President gives the clerics an audience to discuss emerging issues” (Nation Online 2002). A cooperative spirit between the faith sector and governmental sector is not necessarily a bad thing—unless it comes with a loss of critical voice and distance and unwarranted presumptions of policy affinities, which would seem to be the case in this instance.

Chakwera’s conflations of faith and politics were also made evident shortly after taking office in 2020, in his presidential response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Chakwera appeared to place a greater emphasis on acts of piety than on concrete policy action, when he suggested as a national response to the pandemic that the nation fast and pray for three days and then join together subsequently for a newly declared Day of Thanksgiving. Malawian commentators assailed Chakwera’s response to the crisis, stating the following:

Prayers are not a plan, nor is fasting a strategy. The president was elected to do a job, not act as our priest… We are faced with a public health crisis in the form of a virus, not some unknown evil spirit. What will make a difference in the lives of Malawians and reassure the people is robust ACTION by their president, led by science and experts in the field

(Malawi 24 Reporter 2020).

Chakwera’s recommendations do not align well with the responsibilities of governance, but they do align with the dominionist inclinations of some abundance theology frameworks, specifically, the idea that the well-being of society flows from divine sovereignty more than human agency. Chakwera also aligns here with an emphasis by abundance theologies on the power to lay claim to results named through words of faith. Health and finances often are viewed within these frameworks as two of the primary dimensions of life that serve as testaments to believers’ levels of faith—with strong faith manifesting in physical and material abundance and weak faith manifesting in sickness and poverty.

Chakwera may not have the theocratic instincts of former Zambian president, Frederick Chiluba, a born-again Pentecostal Christian who, a few months after taking office in 1991, declared Zambia a “Christian Nation.” Chakwera has also not evidenced so wide a gap as Chiluba between Christian idealizations of public life and fulfilments in public practice (Haynes 2022, pp. 85–102).

Nevertheless, Chakwera’s presidency has embodied the kind of close and explicit associations between imperatives of governance and religious imperatives (specifically, those associated with abundance theology frameworks) that raise the hopes of those desiring religiously defined statecraft and policy trajectories, and that raise the fears of those committed to clearer separations of church and state.

Support for formal–institutional alignments between religion and government within Malawi has tended to come from elites within Malawi’s Christian majority who most directly stand to gain from favorable governmental treatment and access. These church–state alignments have been resisted, however, by religious minority groups likely to be disadvantaged and further marginalized by church–state alliances. As the Secretary General of the Muslim Association of Malawi remarked, “Malawi’s Muslims do not want religious laws, whether Christian or Islamic, imposed on the country” (Bone n.d., p. 19).

Although relations have been mostly cordial at broad societal levels between Malawi’s Christian majority and its minority Muslim community (which currently is 13.8 percent of Malawi’s population), conflicts have emerged over government policies regarded as imposing Christian priorities upon the society. A 2023 report on religious freedom in Malawi cites several such instances, pointing to policies begun in the 2010s prohibiting students attending government schools from wearing Muslim hijabs or Rastafarian dreadlocks and requiring students to take a government-mandated “Bible Knowledge” course. In the early 2020s, however, these policies were mitigated or overturned by Malawi’s High Court, and there have been other reinforcements of Malawi’s constitutional protections of religious freedom (U.S. Department of State 2023).

Although Zambia’s political and religious elites have fluctuated in their views regarding the appropriateness of formal–institutional alignments between religious institutions and government, Malawian public opinion data present the general population as instinctively less inclined toward convergences between religious and political authority and agendas. U.S. State Department reports on religious freedom in Malawi, dating back at least to 2010, routinely classified Malawi as a religiously tolerant society, deriving from its constitutionally mandated religious freedoms and from strongly pluralist cultural norms and traditions embraced by Malawians of various religious and cultural backgrounds. One indication of this is that Malawians often have “participated in business or civil society organizations together” (U.S. Department of State 2010). Additional indicators of religious tolerance across Malawian society are inferred by data from the 2020 Afrobarometer Survey. Drawing upon those data, Kate Hairsline affirms that “many African nations have a deep-rooted culture of religious tolerance,” including Malawi, where 92 percent of survey respondents indicated they would “‘strongly like’, ‘somewhat like’, or ‘not care’ if [they] lived next door to people of a different religion” (Hairsine 2024).

Malawi’s deep-rooted traditions of religious independency, tracing back to the earliest formations of African independent religious expressions within the country, likely have contributed to the widespread respect among contemporary rank-and-file Malawians for religious freedom. In this respect, Malawi’s general populace may be well ahead of its leadership sectors in promoting social premises and practices that contribute within Malawi to the common good and the well-being of society.

6. Concluding Thoughts

African religious independency has impacted variously upon Malawi’s conceptions of its religious and social identity, and upon its ability to cohere around public practices and priorities that assure national well-being. It has existed at the symbolic heart and served as a strategic foundation of a broader, evolving Malawian nationalism—as inspiration, as evaluative metrics, as threat, and as complicit enabler of that broader politics.

While the strategic trajectories of religious independency have been multidirectional, if not mercurial, it has clearly and consistently championed the idea of African empowerment and agency—whether achieved through an oppositional challenging of prevailing authorities and structures or through cooperative leveraging of those existing power configurations. Either way, the greater power toward which both strategic approaches point—and one whose ultimacies resonate deeply within Malawi’s widespread religiosities—is divine power. And both millenarian and dominionist versions of religious independency have been effective in depicting that divine power as immanently proximate.

As credible conduits of divine authority and power, evidenced through acts of socially defiant or organizationally developmental might, the religious independency sector has provided conceptual frameworks that affirm the past, position the present, and project the future. Religious independency mobilizations also have provided African controlled organizational spaces from which to promote those objectives—which is significant when viewed against the legitimacy problems of mainstream secular and sacred leadership within Malawi.

Nonetheless, intersections between religion and politics are complicated in their outcomes and effects, producing what may be understood as degrees of good and bad (whether in social or theological respects). Determinations of good and bad may be difficult, but one thing is clear within the Malawi case: Christianity has been at the center of its modern nation-building process, and independent African adaptations and innovations of the faith have fueled Christian dynamism among one of the most self-identifying Christian populations in the world.