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Witnesses and Watchtower in the Rhodesias and Nyasaland

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

J. R. Hooker
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Extract

One of the most fascinating, if misunderstood, fundamentalist sects operating in Central Africa is the body whose members term themselves Jehovah's Witnesses, the fellowship whose corporate identity is the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, Incorporated, of Brooklyn, New York. Their British branch, the International Bible Students' Association, has struggled most with varieties of recalcitrant African material, and in this unrewarding enterprise operations have been directed into the Rhodesias and Nyasaland from South Africa.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , March 1965 , pp. 91 - 106
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1965

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References

1 For a masterly summary of doctrine see the Bulawayo Chronicle of 24 Sept. 1937, which reported Mr Justice Hudson's summing-up in the case of the Magistrate of Bulawayo v. Oliver Maidstone Kabongo. The shifting date of Armageddon has been a major impediment. See also Shepperson, George and Price, Thomas, Independent African …(Edinburgh, 1958).Google Scholar

2 (Lusaka Archives) ZAI/10, 31 Oct. 1925. Also ZAI, /9/62, Ndola Tour Report for and Appendix 26 of the (Brannigan) Royal Commission of Inquiry Report concerning Copperbelt disturbances, 1956.

3 (Lusaka) Nat. /M /2, VII. Governor of Nyasaland to Governor of Northern Rhodesia, 28 Feb. 1941. Also note 60 on page 412 of Shepperson and Price.

4 (Zomba Archives) NC1 18/14 where the word mpatuko is said to derive from kupatukana, to separate. The letter was written on 19 Sept. 1926 (s2/8/26). Mwenda was freed the following year. Elliott Kenani Kamwana Chirwa was deported to Mauritius in June 1909, released by March 1914 and re-deported around Dec. 1916. His followers were the first to call themselves Watchtowerites. He was released again in 1937, at which time he founded another independent church, the Watchman's Society. See Political Intelligence Bulletin 8 of 20 Aug. 1941 in GoB/G141.

5 (Zomba) NNI/20/2, 18 Dec. 1923. Also (Salisbury) N3/5/8, May 1923 for police view that the Society might ‘be a branch of the late John Chilembwe fraternity’.

6 (Zomba) S2/8/24, 22 April 1925.

7 Ibid. 12 July 1925.

8 (Zomba) NNI, /20/2, 10 Sept. 1924 S2/12/25, 24 March 1925. Nyasaland police strongly urged government's support of Walder: S2/8/24, 24 Sept. 1924.

9 (Zomba) S2/12/25, 9 May 1925.

10 (Zomba) NNI/20/3, 16 July and 21 Aug. 1926; S2/12/25, 16 Jan. 1934.

11 (Zomba) NNI/20/3, 16 Jan. 1931.

12 (Zomba) NNI/20/4, I Aug. 1935.

13 (Salisbury) S84/A/293 and N3/5 /8.

14 See (Salisbury) N3/5/8, Watchtower file, Jan. 1917-Oct. 1923.

15 (Salisbury) S84/A /259. The Northern Rhodesian government proclamation ensured European control of churches and church schools, but officials were cautioned to proceed under its provisions only when order seemed threatened. See (Lusaka) Ksy 1/4/, letter of 20 Sept. 1924.

16 There is a mass of original material in the Lusaka Archives for the study of Nyirenda. See KSM 5/I/I, 2, 3; Sec. /Nat./73; and a memorandum of 13 March 1926 in Secretary/s Office A 533.

17 (Salisbury) ZA I/I0; S84/A/293; S84/A/90. Ruisi's detention for three months and twenty-one days nearly got the A.N.C. in trouble with his superiors. He survived criticism, though his forlorn and pompous justification suggests how ill at ease he was: ‘I alone, without any Government assistance, have attacked the Watch Tower Movement here and conquered.’ (Letter of 30 July 7929.) The belief that Americans were descendants of the lost ones sold beyond the seas was persistent. The earliest trace of the aeroplane theme I have found relates to the Wellington Butulezi affair in the Transkei in 1920. Paradoxically, this insistence upon the blackness of Americans was strengthened by the appearance of American mining engineers on the Copperbelt. (See the confidential note of 3 April 1929 written by the Magistrate at Ndola. Sec. /Nat. /393.)

18 See note I. The reader should recall that at this time the South African High Court was the court of appeal for Southern Rhodesia, which adheres to the Roman-Dutch law. For the Legislative Assembly discussions, see Debates of the Legislative Assembly, 16 (1936), Col. 1119. Judge Rutherford again detected the fell hand of the Roman Church, arguing that the only charitable explanation for this infamous assertion was that ‘some clergyman, acting as the willing tool of the Jesuits, that is, the secret service department of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, wrote that part of your report’. See ‘Roman Catholic Watchtower in Northern Rhodesia’, issued from Brooklyn on New Year's Day, 1936, a pamphlet drawn from a series of articles done for the Golden Age, a Society periodical, by the indefatigable President. There is a copy in the Cripps Collection at the Central African Archives (Salisbury). My own photostat copy was supplied most graciously by the Society. That the Communists too misjudged the Copperbelt situation is suggested by an open letter in the October 1935 issue of The Negro Worker (which in any case was banned in the colonies), wherein the heroic workers, toilers, and Watchtowerites were seen as one anti-capitalist bloc and exhorted to maintain pressure on the colonial Fascists.

19 Rhodes-Livingstone Communication 22(1961), 8I; (Lusaka) RC 3/9/29, Tanganyika District, 1919; ZA 9/2/2/2,15 Aug. 1919.

20 (Lusaka) Ksy I /4/I, letter of 20 Sept. 1924.

21 (Zomba) NNI /20/3, 6 June 1926. It is too bad that Nyirenda's revivalist adjurations have been forgotten; he was far more than a modem witch-finder. For a contemporary scholarly account, see Buell, Raymond, The Native Problem in Africa (New York, 1926), I, 243.Google Scholar

22 (Lusaka) Sec./Nat./73. Deportations from Congo, 1932–4. Notes taken by the British Vice-Consul in an interview with M. de Beauffort of the Justice Administration, Elizabethville, 9 Jan. 1932.

22 (Lusaka) ZA. 1/9/62 I /6. Petauke Tour Report No. 5 of 1934; Sec. /Misc. /15, notes on Rutherford for the Governor's information; Nat. /M /72, VII, 28 Feb. 1941. However, the Protestants in their Katanga conference of 1934 deplored Watchtower as ‘one of the most subversive influences militating against the maintenance of amicable race relations’. Also Nat. /M /2, VIII, 24 July 1946. The police were never as enthusiastic over this doctrine as liberals might Have wished. In the words of one interpolation in an undated intelligence report: ‘Government's policy of watchful tolerance must be followed. It is clearly the duty of the Police to do the watching while others provide the tolerance.’ (Lusaka) Acc. 6z/I/WAz/2,, Feb. 1949.

24 (Lusaka) Acc. 57/5, Watchtower at Ndola and Broken Hill, 1933'6; Sec./Nat./423, Investigations, 1936; Minutes of Provincial Commissioners' Conference, Lusaka, 17–21 Nov. 1942; Russell Commission Report and Sec./Nat./86, I, Ndola, 15–18 April 1936.

25 (Lusaka) Sec./Nat./M/2/I. Governor, Major Sir Hubert Young, to Colonial Secretary, the Honourable W. G. A. Ormsby Gore, 13 Aug. 1937.

26 Quick, Griffith, ‘Some Aspects of the Watch Tower Movement in Northern Rhodesia’, International Review of Missions, XXIX (1940).Google Scholar It still had that reputation when Ian Cunnison visited a decade later. See ‘Watchtower Assembly in Central Africa’, ibid. XL (1951).

27 (Lusaka) Sec./Nat./318; Acc. 90/72, 24 Feb. 1940.

28 (Lusaka) Sec./Nat./3,3, 18 Sept. 1940.

29 (Lusaka) Sec. /Lab././136 (1940); Nat. /M/z, VII, 28 April 1941; also ibid. 28 Feb. 1941: and see Hailey, Lord, Native Administration. …, 292;Google Scholar finally, see marginal note, probably written by Harry Franklin, on copy of Report on Public Opinion at Ndola, Nov. 1941, in Nat. /M/2, VII.

30 (Lusaka) District Circulars II of 1941 (12 May), 27 of 1941 (27 Oct.) and I of 1942 ( Jan.). Also Nat./M/2, VIII, 24 July 1946.

31 (Lusaka) Nat./M/z, VII. Notes by H.F. (? Harry Franklin) and another; also Sec. /Jus. /, Phillips File; Minutes of Provincial Commissioners' Conference, Lusaka, 17–21 Nov. 1942 and Sec. /Lab./45, Nkana and Mindolo, 9–11 June 1942.

32 (Lusaka) Nat. /M /2, VII, letter of 23 Sept. 1944 and Sec. /Nat. /313. See Stroup, H. H., Jehovah's Witnesses (New York, 1945) for an account of the ‘disfellowshipping’ process in Canada.Google Scholar

33 (Lusaka) Nat. /M /2, VIII, 27 Oct. 1945, 24 July, 1946, 27 May 1948 and Sec. /Nat. /313, 3 Sept. 1945. For an uninstructed account of the Society, with a strong anti-American bias, see V. S. Pritchett's review of Stroup in The New Statesman of 13 Oct. 1945.

34 (Lusaka) Nat./M/2, VIII, note to Governor's Conference in Nairobi, 31 Jan. 1947 and N /0075, meeting of Watch Tower Literature Committee, 3 March 1951.

35 (Lusaka) Nat./M/2, VIII, 20 Jan. 1948.

36 (Lusaka) Acc. 52/19, 15 June 1951; Box 432, N/2709/1, 16 Nov. 1954; Brannigan Commission Report, appendix 26(16 March 1951); Box 423, HF/37, 19 May 1952; Acc. 62/1/wa2/, 14 Feb.1949 Mwewa, Parkinson B., The African Railway Workers'Union, Ndola (Rhodes-Livingstone Communication 10, Lusaka, 1958).Google Scholar

37 (Lusaka) Sec./Nat./M/2/1, IV, 24 Sept. 1948 and 27 Jan. 1949.