He was born in Mozambique and brought to present Malawi by his father in 1881. He soon became attached to the Free Church of Scotland mission at Livingstonia, where he was baptized. By the time he was twenty, he was considered one of the mission’s leading protégés. However, in c.1917 he began to break from the mission to preach on his own. He was influenced by the teachings of Joseph BOOTH and seems to have affiliated with both the Seventh Day Adventists and the Watch Tower Movement [see E. K. KAMWANA].

From 1910 to 1916 he organized a chain of Seventh Day Adventist missions in northern Malawi (then called Nyasaland) and took an increasingly vocal stance against the European administration of the country. He was not connected with the violent rising of John CHILEMBWE in southern Nyasaland in 1915, but the government - now greatly alarmed by dissident Africans - deported him the following year.

Mark R. Lipschutz and R. Kent Rasmussen

Bibliography

Lohrentz, Kenneth. “Joseph Booth, Charles Domingo, and the 7th Day Baptists in Northern Nyasaland, 1910-12.” JAH 12 (3), (1971): 461-480.

Shepperson, George A. & Thomas Price. Independent African : John Chilembwe and the Origins, Setting and Significance of the Nyasaland Native Uprising of 1915. Edinburgh: University Press, 1958.

Rotberg, Robert I. The Rising of Nationalism in Central Africa : The Making of Malawi and Zambia, 1873-1964. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967.

Pachai, Bridglal (ed.). Malawi : The History of the Nation. London: Longmans, 1973.

This article is reproduced, with permission, from Dictionary of African Historical Biography, 2nd edition, copyright © 1986, by Mark R. Lipschutz and R. Kent Rasmussen, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California. All rights reserved.