Background
His father had been a tribal chief who was murdered, and Kamwana suffered a dislocated childhood as he continually fled with his mother from Ngoni raids.
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Elliot Achirwa
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Elliot Kenan Kamwana was a Tonga born in Mpopomeni village, Mzimba District in 1872. Moving to South Africa, he was baptised there and worked as a hospital attendant and preached, experiencing the harsh conditions of migrant labour, before he met an itinerant preacher, Joseph Booth, missionary, in Cape Town in 1907, who introduced him to Charles Russell’s Watch Tower teachings. Approximately 10,000 people were baptized under his direction.
Fearful of Kawmana"s actions, the British Colonial authorities exiled him to South Africa, from which he later he moved to Chinde in Portuguese East Africa.
With meteor showers and the outbreak of the War in 1914, Kamwana"s predictions of the end of the world seemed to come true. He was exiled without trial to Mauritius and then the Seychelles where he remained until he was finally allowed to return in 1937.
Kamwana was eventually allowed to return to Nyasaland in 1937, where he initiated the Mlondo or "Watchman" Mission, an African independent church independent of the Watch Tower Society, until his death in the 1956.
