Booth, Joseph, 1851-1932 (English Missionary in Africa)

Biography

Joseph Booth, English missionary to Africa, was born in 1851 in Derby, England to a strongly religious family. In 1880 he emigrated to New Zealand where he became a farmer, then in 1887 moved to Australia where he established himself as a successful small businessman. While in Australia Booth became a member of the Baptist church and became convinced that it was his vocation to be a missionary in Africa. In 1891, despite the death of his first wife whom he had married in 1872, he left Australia with his two young children.

Arriving in Nyasaland (Malawi) in 1892 he established the Zambezi Industrial Mission (ZIM), which he hoped would develop into a network of self-supporting communities in which there was to be no colour bar. Booth's involvement with the ZIM was followed by association with other industrial missions such as the Nyasa Industrial Mission and the Baptist Industrial Mission. Booth organised or supported several other schemes with similar aims including the African Christian Union, the British Christian Union, and the British African Congress.

From the 1890s he was also a keen supporter of institutes to train leaders for the church. He was variously affiliated to the Baptists, Seventh Day Baptists, the Watch Tower movement and Seventh-day Adventists and became a vociferous campaigner for the observation of the Sabbath. He aroused the hostility of other missionaries and colonial authorities by advocating higher wages and more political power for Africans. He spent time in Nyasaland, South Africa, Basutholand (Lesotho), Britain and the United States trying to raise support for his many pro-African schemes. The authorities increasingly frowned upon his activities, suspecting him of fermenting African political descent.

Booth influenced several important African Christian figures including Elliot Kamwana, Charles Domingo, John L. Dubbe and John Chilembwe. He took the latter to American in 1897, a trip which coincided with the publication of Booth's Africa for the Africans which emphasised the need for increased African self reliance and the role of Afro-Americans in attaining it. His activities led to him being accused of contributing to Chilembwe's uprising in Malawi and he and his second wife Annie were deported from Basutholand to England in 1915. Poor and unable to find work, partly due to his pacifist convictions, the Booths struggled to make a life for themselves.

After World War 1 they went to South Africa where their daughter provided accommodation for them and where Booth's wife died in 1921. Booth and his third wife Lillian were forced to return to England because of ill health and possibly because Booth's renewed contacts with Africans were beginning to attract the attention of the authorities. He remained in England suffering bouts of illness until his death in 1932.

Booth's fundamentalism and his apparently radical political and social views have led to varying assessments of his life and effect on African Christianity. He has been called by some unbalanced and dishonest, and by others visionary and ahead of his time. Booth's own opinion of himself was a "pro-African politico-religious freelance type of self-assertive, and somewhat self dependent missionary advocate" (letter to daughter Mary 22 April 1916).

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