Chisiza went north to Tanganyika (now Tanzania), where in 1949 he briefly worked as a clerk in the police records department in Dar es Salaam.
[1] There, he joined and became secretary of the Nyasaland Students' Association active at Makerere College in Kampala, and supported himself by working odd jobs.
[1] Chisiza briefly returned to Nyasaland, before going to Southern Rhodesia in 1953, where he worked as a clerk interpreter and translator for the Indian High Commission in Salisbury (now Harare).
[1] He became involved with Rhodesian anticolonial activists like James Chikerema and George Nyandoro, and in 1955, he was one of the founders of Southern Rhodesia African National Congress Youth League.
[1] Along with Nyandoro and Edson Sithole, he formed the City Youth League (CYL), whose first major accomplishment was the 1956 Salisbury bus boycott.
He was, it is thought, first commended to Banda in a letter (dated 6 July 1957) from Henry Chipembere, who described him as a young man he would like for his 'extreme views' and as 'a self-made intellectual of no university attainments who surprised all with his mental powers'.
[2] He, together with his brother, Yatuta, Kanyama Chiume and Henry Chipembere, worked tirelessly to promote Banda's image as saviour of the native peoples of Nyasaland.
He was a key organiser of Nyasaland African Congress and part of the inner circle that met on 24–25 January 1959 to discuss a change of approach from non-violence to violence where necessary.
Chisiza was arrested, along with other high-profile African dissidents, in the dawn raids of Operation Sunrise on 3 March 1959, when the colonial administration, responding to incidents of rioting in various areas of the country, declared a state of emergency in Nyasaland.
Early in 1961, he visited India where he took part in demonstrations at the American and Belgian embassies protesting the CIA-assisted murder of Patrice Lumumba, the first Prime Minister of the Congo.