Livingstone and three others, including Duncan MacCormick also from Lismore and an African servant, were killed at Magomero, but the women and children were left unharmed on Chilembwe's instructions.
[2] Both Alexander Livingstone and later his son William claimed the title of Baron of Bachuil, although this dignity was not formally recognised until 2004, and it did not imply ownership of any land.
Of this land, 162,000 acres formed the estate that he named Magomero, after a village that David Livingstone had recorded in the same area during his Zambezi expedition.
[11] When Magomero was acquired, it was largely unoccupied and uncultivated, and William Jervis Livingstone needed to find suitable crops and workers.
[12] These Lomwe workers came to Magomero as tenants; initially the men had to work for one month a year in lieu of rent: widows and single women were exempt.
This word originally meant help, such as one neighbour might give another, but it came to mean the work that a tenant on a European-owned estate had to undertake in lieu of rent.
However, Alexander Livingstone Bruce, as a major planter, led estate owners in threatening massive evictions of tenants if this change were implemented, and thangata remained.
[13][19] William Jervis Livingstone was quick-tempered and his actions, including arbitrarily increasing tenants’ workloads and ordering them to be beaten, concerned local district officials from the early years of the 20th century.
[21] These headmen were often Muslim ex-soldiers appointed by him to control the mainly migrant estate workforce: there is no suggestion of any widespread food distribution to tenants.
Unlike the often brutal, sometimes generous, William Jervis Livingstone, Bruce (who had absolute control over estate policy) had the consistent aim of making a profit from its operations.
[22][23] John Chilembwe (1871 – 1915) was a Baptist minister who attended a Church of Scotland mission around 1890, and became a servant of the radical missionary Joseph Booth, in 1892.
[24] Chilembwe started his Providence Industrial Mission in Chiradzulu district: in its first decade, it developed gradually, helped by donations from his American backers, and it founded several churches and schools.
Initially, Chilembwe avoided any criticism of actions or views that the colonial authorities might think were subversive, but by 1913, he had become more politically militant and openly criticised the government over African land rights and the conditions of tenants, particularly those on the Magomero estate, where many of his mission congregation worked.
His personal life was clouded by the death of a daughter and his own worsening health including asthma attacks and declining eyesight.
However, the outbreak and effects of the First World War was the key factor in moving him from merely thinking to planning action, which he believed would lead to the deliverance of the African people of Nyasaland.
[27][28] Following a battle at Karonga in September 1914, Chilembwe wrote an impassioned letter to the "Nyasaland Times" newspaper, saying some of his countrymen, "have already shed their blood", others were being "crippled for life" and were "invited to die for a cause which is not theirs".
This, and the possibility that he learned of his intended deportation, prompted Chilembwe to bring forward the timing of his revolt, which made its success more unlikely.
Chilembwe gathered a small group of mission-educated Africans as his lieutenants, and in December 1914 and early January 1915, planned to attack British rule in Nyasaland.
[30] The aims of the rising remain unclear, as Chilembwe and most of his leading supporters were killed in the uprising or later executed, and as many relevant documents in Nyasaland were destroyed in a archive fire in 1919.
He gathered his followers in Mbomwe church, the first he had built after his return from the United States, to give them final instructions for the rising.
Two groups were sent north to attack the A L Bruce Estates with orders to kill all European men and bring back the head of William Jervis Livingstone, but not to harm any women.
[36][37] One of the two groups sent north led by Wilson Zimba was to attack the headquarters of the Magomero estate, which also stored rifles for part of the Nyasaland Volunteer Reserve.
His cottage was not surrounded before the attack on Livingstone, but when MacCormick became aware of the commotion, he ran to investigate without arming himself with his rifle and was speared to death.
After his death, the 1916 Commission of Enquiry, including government officials and planters, found it convenient to attribute some blame for the Chilembwe revolt to him.
[48] In this enquiry, the Resident at Chiradzulu told the Commission appointed to consider the revolt that the conditions imposed on the A L Bruce Estates were illegal and oppressive, including paying workers poorly or in kind (not in cash), demanding excessive labour from tenants or not recording the work they did, and whipping and beating both workers and tenants.
[49] Oral tales, not recorded until much later, include the widely reported and possibly mythical one that Livingstone used to beat corpses at funerals with his walking stick to make sure they were dead and not simply shamming.