Joseph Booth (1851-1932) was an English independent missionary in Malawi, Lesotho, and South Africa. Because of his radical religious views and egalitarian political outlook, his name became linked to a 1915 African rising in Malawi.

Joseph Booth was born in Derby on Feb. 26, 1851, into a very religious home. He was of an independent, inquiring mind and very early questioned his parents' religious faith. He was strongly pacifist with a critical attitude toward all authority. He became a restless, self-educated man and in the course of his life was an agnostic, a Baptist, a Seventh-Day Adventist, and a member of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society. Strangely enough, it was the reading of Thomas Paine which led him to the Christian faith.

In the 1880s Booth was a sheep farmer in New Zealand and a Baptist lay preacher in Australia. In 1891 he developed a scheme for self-supporting industrial missions...