They were motivated by grievances against the British colonial system, which included forced labour, racial discrimination and new demands imposed on the African population following the outbreak of World War I.

By the morning of 24 January, the colonial authorities had mobilised the Nyasaland Volunteer Reserve (NVR) and called in regular troops from the King's African Rifles (KAR).

After World War II, the growing Malawian nationalist movement reignited interest in the Chilembwe revolt, and after the independence of Malawi in 1964 it became celebrated as a key moment in the nation's history.

[3] The early colonial period saw some immigration and settlement by white colonists, who bought large swathes of territory from local chiefs, often for token payments in beads or guns.

[3] The enforcement of colonial institutions, such as the Hut Tax, compelled many indigenous people to find paid work and the demand for labour created by the plantations led to their becoming a major employer.

[9] Booth was also a staunch advocate of establishing his own industrial mission in addition to the religious one, and acquired 26,537 acres of land at Mitsidi with the help of Harry Johnston.

Anthropologist Brian Morris notes a significant contradiction in Booth's views that Chilembwe ended up inheriting, being a staunch egalitarianist while also calling for a hierarchical plantation economy and highly capitalist society.

[9] Chilembwe returned to Nyasaland in 1900 and, with the assistance of the African-American National Baptist Convention, he founded his independent church, the Providence Industrial Mission, in the village of Mbombwe.

[6] For at least the first 12 years of his ministry, he preached ideas of African self-respect and advancement through education, hard work and personal responsibility, as advocated by Booker T. Washington,[12] and he encouraged his followers to adopt European-style dress and habits.

Chilembwe's acceptance of European culture created an unorthodox anti-colonial ideology based around a form of nationalism, rather than a desire to restore the pre-colonial social order.

[17] Both African classes were highly alienated by the thangata system, which required every tenant to work for the estate owner in order to pay their rent and "hut tax".

[21] From 1914, he preached more militant sermons, often referring to Old Testament themes, concentrating on such aspects as the Israelites' escape from slavery in Egypt ,[22][20] Chilembwe himself was not part of the apocalyptic Watch Tower movement, which was popular in central Africa at the time and later became known as Kitawala in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but some of his followers may have been influenced by it.

[23] The leader of Watch Tower, Charles Taze Russell had predicted that Armageddon would begin in October 1914, which some of Chilembwe's followers equated to an end to colonial rule.

[28] In particular, he formed close ties with Filipo Chinyama in Ncheu, 110 miles (180 km) to the north-west and received his assurance that he would also mobilise his followers to join the rebellion when it broke out.

A disaffected follower of Chilembwe reported the preacher's "worrying intentions" to Philip Mitchell, a colonial civil servant (and future governor of Uganda and Kenya), in August 1914.

[30] This is the only way to show the whitemen, [sic] that the treatment they are treating our men and women was most bad and we have determined to strike a first and a last blow and then we will all die by the heavy storm of the whiteman's army.

During the night of Saturday 23–24 January, the rebels met at the Mission church in Mbombwe, where Chilembwe gave a speech stressing that none of them should expect to survive the reprisals that would follow the revolt but that the uprising would draw greater attention to their conditions and destabilise the colonial system.

[31] A contingent of rebels was sent to Blantyre and Limbe, about 15 miles (24 km) to the south, where most of the white settlers lived and where the insurgents hoped to capture the African Lakes Corporation (ALC)'s store of weapons.

[29] A third building, occupied by Emily Stanton, Alyce Roach and five children, contained a small cache of weapons and ammunition belonging to the local rifle club.

[29] The insurgents quietly broke into the Livingstone's house and injured him during hand-to-hand fighting, prompting him to take refuge in the bedroom, where his wife attempted to treat his wounds.

[38] Led by Jonathan Chigwinya, the insurgents stormed one of the houses and killed the plantation's stock manager, Robert Ferguson, with a spear as he lay in bed reading a newspaper.

[38][37] Two of the colonists, John Robertson and his wife Charlotte, escaped into the cotton fields and walked 6 miles (9.7 km) to a neighbouring plantation to raise the alarm.

The mission was defended by four African armed guards, one of whom was killed; Father Swelsen was also wounded in the fighting and the church was burnt down, resulting in the death of a young girl who was inside at the time.

[54] After the defeat of the rebellion, most of the remaining insurgents attempted to escape eastwards across the Shire Highlands, towards Portuguese East Africa, from where they hoped to head north to German-controlled territory.

[55] The colonial authorities responded quickly to the uprising with as much force and as many troops, policemen and settler volunteers it could muster to hunt down and kill suspected rebels.

[56] Worrying that the rebellion might rapidly reignite and spread, the authorities instigated arbitrary reprisals against the local African population, including mass hut burnings.

[60] Although delayed by the war, the Nyasaland Police, which had been primarily composed of Africans conscripted by colonial officials, was restructured as a professional force of white settlers.

It was a "struggle for freedom" with elements of Christian utopianism, with Chilembwe expressing two contrasting political traditions - Booth's radical egalitarianism and a "petty capitalist orientation" of the Protestant churches, which stressed the right to private property, wage labour and commercial agriculture.

[41] The Malawi Congress Party, which ultimately led the country to independence in 1964, made a conscious effort to identify its leader Hastings Banda with Chilembwe through speeches and radio broadcasts.

[27] John McCracken attacks the idea that the revolt could be considered nationalist, arguing that Chilembwe's ideology was instead fundamentally utopian and created in opposition to localised abuses of the colonial system, particularly thangata.