As early as 1897, Malawian missionaries James Gray Kamlinje and Mungo Murray Chisuse had visited Scotland and learned to ride bicycles. Reports in settler newspapers on ‘native cyclists’ participating in exhibitions or running afoul of the law provides further evidence of local adoption of the bicycle. Some members of the land-owning Malawian elite had also acquired bicycles in the years before the First World War, including John Chilembwe, Duncan Njilimia, John Gray Kufa, Gordon Mataka, and George Masangano. All of whom, with the exception of Mataka, would take leadership roles in Chilembwe’s uprising while Kufa, Njilimia, and Chilembwe would lose their lives as a result. According to the historian John McCracken, although a useful means of transportation, for members of this elite group ‘bicycles were also prestige objects demonstrating … their right to be considered as civilised gentlemen in an overwhelmingly racist society’. Following the Chilembwe Rising in 1915, all the bicycles owned by this native elite were ‘looted by the government forces’. It is entirely possible, although not certain, that Duff acquired the bicycle now in Birmingham’s collection from these raids.
John Chilembwe was born in Chiradzulu, Malawi in June 1871. In 1880, he became a student at the Church of Scotland mission in Blantyre where he converted to Christianity. As a student, Chilembwe showed talent and became an assistant to Joseph Booth, a white British missionary who preached racial equality and argued for ‘Africa for the Africans’. In 1897, with the help of Booth, Chilembwe travelled to the United States to attend the Virginia Theological College in Lynchburg.
His arrival in Virginia attracted the attention of the Richmond Planet, the state’s largest Black newspaper. In keeping with the race pride and uplift mantra of the end of the nineteenth century, the Planet reported that Chilembwe was ‘surprised’ to find Black southerners in positions of ‘preachers, lawyers and doctors’ and that he was in Virginia to ‘get an education, and then return to his own country to preach the gospel … and establish an industrial school for his people’. According to Mungo Murray Chisuse, Chilembwe’s friend, in the United States, Chilembwe was awakened to his race, including racial discrimination, the history of abolitionism, and the freedom movements of ‘coloured peoples’. After his sojourn in Virginia, Chilembwe returned to Malawi in 1900 as an ordained minister and with the help of the African American National Baptist Convention founded the Ajana Providence Industrial Mission near Blantyre along the lines of other industrial uplift institutions in Africa and the US South.