Elliott Kanan Kamwana (1882?–1956) was a preacher in Nyasaland (now Malawi) who popularised the Watch Tower movement into central Africa, and subsequently created his own independent Church.
Elliot Kenan Kamwana was a Tonga born in Mpopo-meni village, Mzimba district in 1882. 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. He attended the Mission school at Bandawe between 1898 and 1901 distinguishing himself until frustrated in his repeated attempts to attain baptism and ordination, he left. 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 in Cape Town in 1907, who introduced him to Charles Russell’s Watch Tower teachings. He subsequently returned to Nyasaland offering baptism and entrance to the Church, bypassing the restricted entry procedures imposed by the Scottish missionaries. 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 now Mozambique. With meteor showers and the outbreak of the War in 1914, Kamwana's predictions of the end of the world seemed to come true. After he had returned to Nyasaland and was imprisoned there, his brother was caught attempting to smuggle 'subversive' letters and Watch Tower pamphlets to Kamwana. He was exiled without trial to Mauritius and then the Seychelles where he remained until he was finally allowed to return in 1937. In exile he continued to disseminate Millenarian teachings, writing apocalyptic letters to his followers in Central Africa in the style of John of Patmos.
Kamwana was eventually allowed to return to Nyasaland in 1937, where he inititated the Watchman Mission, an African Independent Church independent of the Watch Tower Society, until his death in the 1956.
‘A very antagonistic spirit’: Elliot Kamwana, Christianity and the end of the world in Nyasaland: Henry Donati, Dissertation, University of Oxford