threads / movement #195

31 newly added in the last 14 days mark read

1. 1856 to 1857 new

   Nongqawuse and the Xhosa cattle-killing prophecy

   The young Xhosa prophetess Nongqawuse said the ancestors would rise, drive out the British, and renew the world if the people killed their cattle and destroyed their crops. Believers slaughtered herds and the resulting famine killed tens of thousands and broke Xhosa independence. Historians still debate the movement, reading it variously as a millenarian response to lungsickness and land loss or, in some contested accounts, as a plot; the record rests heavily on colonial and oral sources.

2. c. 1885 new

   Land and ancestors as sacred ground

   also in Religion and ideology

   In many African religions land was not a commodity but the home of the ancestors and the spirits who guaranteed its fertility. Colonial land seizure and the fencing of shrines, groves, and burial grounds was felt as a spiritual violation, not just a theft of property. This helps explain why so many revolts drew on ritual and the dead rather than on secular grievance alone.

3. c. 1890 new

   Missionaries seen as the spiritual arm of conquest

   also in Religion and ideology

   Christian missions often arrived alongside traders, soldiers, and administrators, and many Africans read them as the spiritual wing of the same conquest. Missionaries attacked ancestor veneration, initiation, and traditional medicine as heathen or as witchcraft. Defending the old religion therefore became a way of defending the whole social order against foreign rule.

4. 1892 new

   The Ethiopian Church and the rise of Ethiopianism

   Mangena Mokone left the Wesleyan Methodists and founded the Ethiopian Church in 1892, protesting the color bar inside white-led missions. The name drew on Psalm 68:31, 'Ethiopia shall stretch out her hands unto God,' read as a prophecy of African redemption. Ethiopianism became a wider movement of African-led churches that carried an implicit challenge to white religious and political control.

5. c. 1895 new

   Traditional religion binds clans and grants legitimacy

   also in Religion and ideology

   Shared shrines, oaths, and prophetic figures could unite clans and chiefdoms that had no common government. A revolt blessed by a respected medium or priest carried a legitimacy no ordinary war leader could claim. Religion supplied both the network and the moral authority that turned local anger into a wider rising.

6. June 1896 to 1897 new

   The mediums Nehanda and Kaguvi and the First Chimurenga

   In the 1896-97 risings against the British South Africa Company, the Shona spirit mediums Nehanda (Charwe) and Kaguvi (Gumboreshumba) gave the revolt its unity and sanction. As voices of powerful mhondoro ancestor spirits, they called on people to reject Company rule and its cattle and tax demands. Their leadership shows how far the war was organized through the religious authority of mediums rather than through chiefs alone.

7. c. 1896 new

   Africa for the Africans and the independent church movement

   Across southern Africa, Africans broke from white-controlled missions to found their own churches, often linking with the African Methodist Episcopal Church from the United States. The slogan 'Africa for the Africans' captured the mood, blending religious independence with an early nationalism. Colonial officials watched these churches closely, fearing that self-rule in the pulpit would spread to politics.

8. 27 April 1898 new

   Execution of Nehanda and Kaguvi

   After the rising was crushed, the mediums Nehanda and Kaguvi were captured, tried, and hanged. Oral tradition holds that Nehanda went to the gallows defiant, and later accounts credit her with the promise that her bones would rise again, a line that made her an icon of the later independence war. The details of her final words are remembered through tradition and cannot be fully documented.

9. c. 1900 new

   Colonial rule undermines the authority of elders and priests

   also in Religion and ideology

   Elders, priests, rainmakers, and spirit mediums held power because they mediated between people, ancestors, and the divine. Colonial courts, chiefs, and taxes stripped them of authority and replaced ritual sanction with the power of the state. Many religious leaders resisted because conquest threatened not only their people but their own standing and calling.

10. c. 1900 new

    Missions and schools set out to replace the old faiths

    Missions and the colonial state worked hand in hand to supplant African religion, using schools, clinics, and access to jobs to draw people toward the church. Converts were often pressed to give up ancestor rites, polygamy, initiation, and traditional medicine as conditions of belonging. This slow replacement of belief and ritual was as central to conquest as any battle, and it provoked lasting resistance.

11. c. 1900 new

    War medicine and the belief in invulnerability

    also in Religion and ideology

    Prophets across the continent offered charms, oils, and water said to turn enemy bullets to water or make fighters invulnerable. Whatever their physical effect, these rites gave courage and bound scattered fighters into a single cause under a shared vow. The promise of protection recurs in the Maji Maji, Chimurenga, and Nyabingi risings, and its repeated failure in battle often broke a movement's morale.

12. c. 1904 new

    Kinjikitile Ngwale and the maji war-medicine

    The prophet Kinjikitile Ngwale, said to be possessed by a spirit linked to the deity Bokero or Hongo, gave followers a sacred water called maji that was believed to turn German bullets into water. The medicine crossed ethnic lines and knit many peoples into a single movement against forced cotton labor and German rule. Germans hanged Kinjikitile in 1905 as the revolt began, but the maji cult he founded carried on without him.

13. July 1905 to 1907 new

    Maji Maji Rebellion

    also in Colonialism: the conquest of the world, The Scramble for Africa

    Peoples of German East Africa unite in revolt against colonial forced labor. German suppression and induced famine kill up to 300,000 people.

14. c. 1908 new

    The Kitawala and Watchtower movement in Central Africa

    Watch Tower teaching, spread from about 1908 by preachers such as Elliot Kamwana in Nyasaland, took root across Central Africa as the movement called Kitawala. Its message that God's kingdom would soon sweep away earthly rulers was heard as a promise of the end of colonial power. Authorities across several territories saw it as subversive and banned and jailed its adherents repeatedly.

15. 1910 new

    Isaiah Shembe founds the Nazareth Baptist Church

    The Zulu prophet Isaiah Shembe founded the Nazareth Baptist Church, one of the largest of the Zionist-type African independent churches. He wove Zulu custom, dance, and dress together with Christian worship, offering a faith that did not require Africans to abandon their culture. Such churches asserted a spiritual independence that quietly rejected the missionaries' claim to define the true religion.

16. 1911 new

    Muhumusa and the Nyabingi resistance

    The Nyabingi movement of the Uganda-Rwanda borderlands centered on a female spirit, Nyabingi, whose priestesses claimed her power to heal and to command. The best known, Muhumusa, led armed resistance to German and then British authority until her capture and detention by the British in 1911. The cult continued under other mediums for years, and its persistence pushed the British to outlaw it.

17. 1912 new

    Colonial banning of the Nyabingi cult

    After years of Nyabingi-led resistance, the British used witchcraft legislation to outlaw the cult and prosecute its mediums. Labeling the movement witchcraft let the state treat a religious network as simple crime and criminalize belief in the spirit itself. The Nyabingi name later traveled far and is often cited as one root of the word Rastafari, though that link is debated.

18. 1913 to 1914 new

    Mekatilili wa Menza and the Giriama uprising

    The Giriama woman leader Mekatilili wa Menza rallied resistance to British demands for labor and taxes by invoking Mijikenda tradition, the sacred kaya forest shrine, and binding oaths. She drew authority from custom and the ancestors rather than from any colonial office. The British deported her and attacked the kaya, but she became a lasting symbol of coastal Kenyan resistance.

19. 1913 to 1915 new

    William Wade Harris and the Harrist revival

    The Liberian Grebo prophet William Wade Harris walked through the Ivory Coast and Gold Coast preaching, baptizing, and calling people to burn their traditional charms, and tens of thousands converted in one of West Africa's largest mass movements. He founded an African-led Christianity outside missionary control. Wary of his influence, the French authorities expelled him back to Liberia in 1915.

20. c. 1913 new

    The Mumbo cult in western Kenya

    also in Nyanza and Kisumu: lake economy, Luo opposition and state repression

    The Mumbo cult, traced in oral tradition to a Luo man named Onyango Dunde who said a serpent deity rose from Lake Victoria and spoke to him, promised that Europeans and their religion would vanish. It rejected Christianity, taxes, and colonial authority and spread among Luo and Gusii communities. The colonial government treated it as subversive and moved repeatedly to suppress it.

    • History of the Southern Luo
    • Nyanza: The Odinga dynasty and beyond
    • Not Yet Uhuru
    • Assassination and Political Unity: Kenya
    • Ballots to Bullets: Organized Political Violence and Kenya's Crisis of Governance
21. 23 January 1915 new

    John Chilembwe's rising in Nyasaland

    John Chilembwe, an American-educated Baptist minister, led an armed rising against British rule, protesting land dispossession, harsh plantation labor, and the drafting of Africans to fight in the First World War. His preaching fused Christian conviction with a demand for African dignity and justice. The revolt was quickly crushed and Chilembwe was killed, but he became a founding figure of Malawian nationalism.

22. c. 1918 new

    The Aladura praying churches in Nigeria

    The Aladura, meaning 'owners of prayer' in Yoruba, arose around the 1918 influenza pandemic when prayer groups turned to healing and prophecy outside the mission churches. They stressed divine healing, dreams, and visions and rejected both European medicine and traditional charms. Independent and African-led, they built a Christianity on Yoruba terms rather than on those set by the colonial missions.

23. c. 1919 new

    Enoch Mgijima and the Israelites

    The prophet Enoch Mgijima founded the Israelites, a millenarian church whose followers gathered on land at Ntabelanga to await the end of days. They refused to disperse or to recognize the authority of the state over their holy ground. Their stand set up the confrontation that would end in the Bulhoek massacre.

24. April 1921 new

    Simon Kimbangu's healing ministry in the Congo

    Simon Kimbangu, a Baptist catechist, began healing the sick and preaching at Nkamba in 1921, and crowds abandoned work and mission churches to follow him. His movement, though Christian, was read by the Belgians as an African challenge to colonial and church authority. The Kimbanguist church he inspired grew into one of Africa's largest independent churches despite decades of persecution.

25. 24 May 1921 new

    The Bulhoek massacre

    When Enoch Mgijima's Israelites refused police orders to leave their settlement, South African police opened fire and killed around 160 to 200 believers, most armed only with knobkerries and faith. The massacre showed how far the state would go against a religious community that would not submit. It became a lasting symbol of the violence at the heart of colonial and settler rule.

26. September 1921 new

    Kimbangu arrested and sentenced to life

    Only months after his ministry began, the Belgians arrested Simon Kimbangu and a military court sentenced him to death for threatening state security. The king commuted the sentence to life, and Kimbangu spent thirty years in prison at Elisabethville until his death in 1951. The Belgians deported tens of thousands of his followers to break the movement, yet it survived underground and grew.

27. c. 1923 new

    Colonial bans on the Kitawala and Watchtower churches

    Fearing the movement's message that colonial power would soon end, British and Belgian authorities repeatedly banned Kitawala and jailed or deported its preachers. In the Belgian Congo it was linked to unrest and driven underground. The crackdowns confirmed for many followers that the earthly rulers the movement condemned were indeed the enemy.

28. c. 1925 new

    Witchcraft ordinances and the war on traditional religion

    Colony after colony passed witchcraft ordinances that criminalized witch-finding and, in effect, much of traditional religious practice. Officials cast diviners, healers, and priests as agents of superstition and fraud, stripping them of standing. By defining the old religion as crime, the colonial state gave itself a legal tool to suppress the very authorities who so often led resistance.

29. 1929 new

    The female circumcision controversy and the church revolt in Kenya

    When Protestant missions demanded that members renounce female circumcision, a practice bound up with Kikuyu initiation and identity, many broke away rather than abandon their custom. The split fed the growth of independent African churches and independent schools that stayed free of missionary control. The clash tied the defense of tradition to the rising nationalism that would later feed the fight for independence.

30. c. 1952 new

    The Mau Mau oath binds fighters through ritual

    In the Mau Mau revolt, Kikuyu fighters were bound to the cause through traditional oathing rites that carried heavy spiritual weight and drew on the authority of the ancestors and the land. The oath turned personal grievance over stolen land into a sacred obligation. The practice is treated in depth in the Mau Mau and Kenya threads and is noted here only as one more case of ritual binding resistance.

31. 1954 new

    Banning and final proscription of the Mumbo cult

    The colonial government harassed and banned the Mumbo cult for decades before formally proscribing it in 1954, at the height of the Mau Mau emergency. Officials treated its rejection of Christianity, taxes, and European rule as a standing threat. Its long survival under pressure shows how a prophetic movement rooted in local belief could outlast repeated attempts to stamp it out.