Malawi

The Maravi confederacy that named the country had its own sacred geography, centred on territorial spirit shrines of which the greatest, the M'bona shrine at Khulubvi in the lower Shire valley, still receives offerings for rain through a hereditary priesthood, a cult studied by scholars as one of the best documented African territorial religions. The nineteenth century rewired everything. Swahili and Yao traders tied the lake to the coast, and with the trade came Islam, which the Yao adopted widely enough that the lakeshore and the south remain Muslim heartlands.

In the same decades David Livingstone's reports summoned Scottish missions to the highlands, Livingstonia in the north and Blantyre in the south, whose schools produced much of the nationalist elite, while the Catholic White Fathers and Montfort missionaries built a church that is today the country's largest single denomination.

Independent Christianity has deep roots too, from Watchtower preachers to the prophetic healing churches that flourish now. The churches never fully left politics: the Presbyterian and Catholic hierarchies' 1992 pastoral letter against Hastings Banda's dictatorship is widely credited with opening the door to multiparty rule, and pulpits remain a genuine public square in one of the world's most observant countries.

John Chilembwe was a mission educated preacher who studied at a Baptist seminary in Virginia in the 1890s, absorbed the Black church's language of dignity, and came home to found the Providence Industrial Mission at Mbombwe. For fifteen years he built schools, planted coffee, and preached self respect in European clothes, the model of the improving mission pastor.

What radicalised him was the plantation economy around him, above all the neighbouring Bruce estates where his congregants laboured under the thangata system, and the mass conscription of Nyasaland men as carriers in the First World War. His open letter to the Nyasaland Times protesting that Africans were dying in a war not their own was censored, and in January 1915 he led a rising of a few hundred followers. It was brief and doomed; a manager was killed, the rising was crushed within weeks, Chilembwe was shot by police as he made for Mozambique, and his church was dynamited. Yet the rising became the founding memory of Malawian nationalism. Commissions of inquiry blamed settler abuses, later politicians claimed his mantle, and today Chilembwe's face is on Malawi's banknotes and 15 January is a public holiday, John Chilembwe Day, a rare case of a preacher's failed insurrection becoming a nation's origin story.