Charles Vincente Domingo: Pioneer African Seventh Day Baptist

Do we see history through the tinted glasses of our own culture? My own myopic and ethnocentric view of history has focused over the years on England and America. Primarily, my ancestry is from England and Wales and my religious heritage, all the way back to the seventeenth century, is Seventh Day Baptist. Some "famous" Seventh Day Baptists were, in England, the martyr John James, the hymn-writing Stennetts, and the lexicographer Nathaniel Bailey, and in America the Governor Wards of Rhode Island, philanthropist Henry Collins, and more recently West Virginia Senator Jennings Randolph. Even in China, in the nineteenth century, Seventh Day Baptist work began with American missionaries, which included the Davis clan. And in Africa, Seventh Day Baptists commenced with famous, some might say notorious, missionary and denomination-hopper Joseph Booth, a transplanted European (England/Australia/Africa) visionary, an advocate of Africans, who wrote the staunchly anti-colonial Africa for the African (1897). Joseph Booth, was described by one researcher (Kenneth Lohrentz), perhaps a little derogatorily, as "adhering to a rare fusion of biblical fundamentalism and social radicalism," a portrayal that brings to my mind the name of John Brown.

Yet the only Seventh Day Baptist covered in Lamin Sanneh's 2008 groundbreaking book, Disciples of All Nations, is Charles Domingo, an African. Lamin Sanneh, himself an African, albeit a West African from Gambia, is Professor of History and World Christianity at Yale University. Sanneh describes Domingo as "independent minded" and  "a pioneer agent of the expansion of the [Seventh Day Baptist] mission among Africans." The life of Charles Domingo has been studied in other scholarly works, beginning with Independent African by Shepperson and Price in 1958.

So who is Charles Vincente Domingo, and why has he been the subject of research in the past half century? A mission trip to Malawi in September 2009, with two stops at Chancellor College, University of Malawi, provided me some answers. Admittedly I had to do some research in the U.S. before and after my trip.

The details of Charles Vicente Domingo's early life are somewhat sketchy, the dates uncertain. Domingo, was from the Kunda people (of Bantu ethnicity) born about 1875 in Portuguese East Africa (present-day Mozambique) along the Lower Shire River. His date of birth has variably been given in the history books as 1870, 1875, and 1880.  His father was a cook, apparently alcoholic,  who was employed by the African Lakes Company in Quilimane. Likely, as Sanneh notes, the boy had Roman Catholic upbringing, the territory being Portuguese.

Through God's providence, Charles Domingo was brought as a child by William Koyi to the Livingstonia Mission in northern Nyasaland, a pioneer mission, newly established, in 1875,  by the Free Church of Scotland. William Koyi, himself, was a noteworthy African Presbyterian Evangelist. Domingo's date of arrival at Livingstonia has been given as either 1876 or 1881. At Livingstonia he became a houseboy, and later a protege, in the home of a now-famous missionary named Doctor Robert Laws. Dr Laws often taught Domingo as he worked at the carpenter bench.

Domingo studied locally, and then for two years at the foremost mission school in South Africa, Lovedale Institution, where Laws had taken him and two other young Africans. Laws was at the time on his way back to Scotland for rest and medical help.

In 1897 Domingo became the first African certificated teacher in Nyasaland (renamed Malawi at independence in 1964), teaching students, of mostly elementary school age, for six years at the Overtoun Institution. W. P. Livingstone wrote favorably about  Domingo, "An ideal teacher, he maintained order and discipline, yet contrived to keep the pupils bright and happy."

Domingo also completed a rigorous course in theology at Livingstonia (1899-1900). His classes included Church History, Old and New Testament Exegesis, and Systematic Theology. Domingo was licensed to preach in 1902, and became an able preacher and elder. The Livingstonia Presbyterians, though they had one of the earliest missions in the Northern Province, ordained no Africans until 1914. Domingo, probably in protest, had abruptly left Livingstonia and the Presbyterians the end of 1907.

Charles Domingo was then baptized by immersion in southern Nyasaland by John Chilembwe, who as Joseph Booth's protege, had gone to the United States with Booth, and completed his coursework at Virginia Theological Seminary (1897-1900), a National (Black) Baptist institution.

Domingo, through Joseph Booth's influence as well, became a Seventh Day Baptist about 1909 (Sanneh puts the date anywhere between 1907 and 1910). He shepherded 180 baptized believers at nine stations in Mzimba district, in Ngoniland in northern Nyasaland. By 1912 Seventh Day Baptists in Nyasaland numbered several thousand, being concentrated in the Ngoni (Angoni) region of northern Nyasaland.

 Domingo opened schools in the Mzimba district, and though supplies and funds were meager, stressed the self-sufficiency of these schools. American Seventh Day Baptists W. D. Wilcox and N. O. Moore during a visit to the mission in Nyasaland in 1912 noted that Domingo "had a well planned and organized school." Education, to Domingo, provided a prime avenue for advancement for Africans. Interestingly, Domingo even wrote Booth that they needed "a boarding school like Tuskegee."

In 1971, Kenneth Lohrentz, looking back, would write in the Journal of African History, "During 1910-12, the establishment of Seventh Day Baptist separatist and independent schools in northern Nyasaland revealed an intense desire among Africans to acquire an education apart from missionary control, and provided the context for patterns of African-European interaction which fostered the formulation of anti-European attitudes.

Lamin Sanneh in his 2008 book describes Domingo's educational program, with some detail. "Reading material, including scriptures, were translated and distributed, and received with much appreciation by the Africans for whom literature and education were in short supply. Accordingly, however small in size, each native church tried to establish a school for its members. The schools taught not only religion and literacy, but also ideas that challenged white control...Scriptural texts provided a narrative structure for community building, for a new Zion of peace and justice."  

Domingo led the Seventh Day Baptists from 1910 to 1916. There were at times almost insurmountable difficulties. Grinding poverty affected the Domingos and  their fellow African Seventh Day Baptists. Dr. Robert Laws wrote to fellow missionary Dr. Alexander Hetherwick in 1915 that Domingo was "in very poor circumstances-almost in rags." He had turned down a clerkship at the Boma (local government administrative center), confident that God would provide for him. In 1911 we know that his wife Sarah and two children were forced to move about in search of food. Official financial support by American Seventh Day Baptists was cut off, after a fairly critical report in 1912 from Wilcox and Moore to Seventh Day Baptists in the United States. There were doctrinal, disciplinary, and financial problems that encumbered the churches. Seventh Day Baptists lost jobs at the European estates for refusing to work on the Seventh Day Sabbath; consequently, they might be unable to pay the onerous annual (6 shillings or about $2) hut tax, and were subject to arrest and imprisonment, thrashing with chikoti (a hippo hide whip), and sentencing to hard labor. Domingo had previously written, "Still God alone is able to help us on and pass through such difficulties until in the name of Christ we conquer."

Domingo corresponded with Joseph Booth in Capetown, South Africa. Booth had, nearly a decade earlier, in 1903, been deported from Nyasaland to South Africa, because of his "Ethiopianism" and advocacy of independence for Africans from British rule by 1920. After the native "Rising of 1915" (during World War I), even harsher terms were imposed on Joseph Booth, though as a pacifist he was not involved in the armed uprising. Domingo had welcomed Walter Cockerill, a youthful, bicycle-riding, independent Seventh Day Baptist missionary from Berlin, Wisconsin. Domingo had Cockerill preach in his church during September of 1915. In 1915 Booth (once again) and Cockerill were deported from Central Africa, even though neither were involved in the 1915 native uprising led by John Chilembwe. The name of Cockerill's home town, Berlin, may have heightened the suspicions of the British, who were at war with the Germans. The Germans were,  as well, on Nyasaland's border, over in Tanganyika. Years later, the scholars would dub Cockerrill "An Innocent Abroad" and 'The Seventh Day Baptist Scapegoat."

In 1916 a letter from Domingo to Booth, within which Domingo had belatedly signed Booth's British African Congress petition of 1915, was intercepted by the British colonial government. Domingo avoided arrest by voluntarily leaving Nyasaland to do missionary work in the Zambezi delta. After World War I, in 1919, Domingo returned from Mozambique, once again to Mzimba in northern Malawi and, in relative isolation, carried on an independent Seventh Day Baptist work. Perhaps not so ironically, he also worked for the local colonial government into the 1930's.

His wife Sarah, interviewed years later, in 1968, recalled that his main two differences with the Presbyterians, whom he had left in 1907, were in regard to the Seventh Day Sabbath and the way the Africans were treated. Evidence of any major shift in his doctrinal beliefs after leaving the Presbyterians is lacking; he seems to have continued to have an orthodox (evangelical) theology, which included a strong sense of God's providence.  

Before World War I, Joseph Booth and Charles Domingo together had been the editors of The African Sabbath Recorder. Six issues of the African Sabbath Recorder were published between 1911 and 1913. Domingo's letters and appeals also sometimes appeared in American Seventh Day Baptist publications, like the Sabbath Recorder. Booth would claim, "Pastor Charles Domingo sees the need and great possibilities for Africa...more than any other living man thus far."

Scholarly books and articles about Central Africa, beginning with Independent Africa (1958) have highlighted the pioneer role of  pastors trained by Joseph Booth, the most significant being John Chilembwe, Elliott Kamwana, and Charles Domingo, in advocating African equality and freedom, and  stirring the spirit of African independence, which finally culminated in independence for African nations, including Malawi itself in 1964. A movie about John Chilembwe, national hero of modern-day Malawi, is being produced and is to include Booth, Kamwana and Domingo. 

Charles Domingo was a critic of compartmentalized and hypocritical Christendom. His Christian faith was holistic, integrating theology and life. Kenneth Lohrentz, in a 1971 article in the Journal of African History labelled Domingo "a rebel in religious garb," while also acknowledging his foundational Christian belief system and that he was not a political figure.

Charles Domingo's beliefs, as Professor John McCracken aptly writes, were "grounded on the authority of the Bible, and started with the premise that all races are equal." A succinct quote from Charles Domingo himself perhaps best gives us a glimpse of Domingo's Biblical anchor and of his prophetic voice for African freedom:
 

"What is the difference between a black man and a white man? Are we not of the same blood, and all from Adam"



For Further Reading

Booth, Joseph, Africa for the African, Baltimore, 1897, Reprint edited by Laura Perry, Blantyre, Malawi: CLAIM (Christian Literature Association in Malawi), 1996.

Booth, Joseph and Charles V. Domingo, editors, The African Sabbath Recorder (An Occasional Paper), Published at the Sabbath Mission House, Cape Town, South Africa, volumes 1-6, 1911-1913

Langworthy, Emily Booth, This Africa Was Mine, Stirling, 1952.

Langworthy, H. W., "Charles Domingo, Seventh Day Baptists and Independency," Journal of Religion in Africa, 15, 1985.

Langworthy, Harry, 'Africa for the African': The Life of Joseph Booth, Blantyre: CLAIM (Christian Literature Association in Malawi), 1996.

Langworthy, Harry W., editor,  "Letters of Charles Domingo," unpublished manuscripts deposited in the Seventh Day Baptist Historical Society and the Malawian collection of the Library, Chancellor college, University of Malawi, Zomba, Malawi,  ca. 1983. 

Livingstone, W. P., Laws of Livingstonia, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1921.

Lohrentz, Kenneth, " Joseph Booth, Charles Domingo, and the Seventh Day Baptists in Northern Nyasaland, 1910-12," Journal of African History, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge England,  XII, 3 (1971), 401-480.

Macdonald, Roderick J., "A History of African Education in Nyasaland, 1875-1945,"  Ph.D. thesis, Edinburgh University, Scotland, 1969, v. 1, 175-179.

McCracken, John, Politics and Christianity in Malawi 1875-1940: The Impact of the Livingstonia Mission in the Northern Province, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977, reprinted Blantrye: CLAIM, 2000.

Oliver, Roland, "Too Cheaty, Too Thefty... The Seeds of Nationalism in Nyasaland," The Twentieth Century, CIXV (1959), 365-368.

Pachai, Bridglal, Malawi: The History of the Nation, London: Longman, 1971.

Pearson, David, Seventh Day Baptists in Central Africa, published with funding from the Seventh Day Baptist Historical Society, 2003.

Phiri, D. D., History of Malawi: From Earliest Times to the Year 1915, Blantyre: CLAIM, 2004.

Ross, Andrew C., "The Origins and Development of the Church of Scotland Mission", Blantyre, Nyasaland, 1875-1926, Ph.D. thesis., University of Edinburgh, 1968

Rotberg, Robert I., The Rise of Nationalism in Central Africa: The Making of Malawi and Zambia, 1873-1964, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972.

Sanneh, Lamin, Disciples of All Nations: Pillars of World Christianity, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Shepperson, George and Thomas Price, Independent African: John Chilembwe and the Origins, Setting and Significance of the Nyasaland Native Rising of 1915, Edinburgh: The University Press, 1958.

Tangri, Roger K., "The development of modern African politics and the emergence of a nationalist movement in colonial Malawi, 1891-1958," Ph.D. thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1970.