The Mwana Lesa Movement

Record summary

The Mwana Lesa movement was an early twentieth-century African prophetic movement in Northern Rhodesia associated with claims of revelation, healing and religious renewal. Colonial administrative and missionary materials treated it as a disruptive or millenarian movement, while later scholarship places it within African responses to labor migration, Christianity and colonial authority. It may provide comparative material on prophetic dreams, possession and collective expectation, but the exact biography of its leader and local chronology must be established from archival sources rather than assumed from later summaries.