In May 1881 a headman and slave-dealer named Segao claimed the ancestors had visited him in the night with a message about the UMCA missionaries. Segao, who was hostile to the mission, was based in Mkuzi village in the Magila region near the nyika (uncultivated land, forest) where the missionaries had been burning lime to produce the mortar for building a stone church and other stone buildings at their main site in Msalabani a few miles away. Segao's vision suggested that this lime-burning disturbed and angered the ancestors, so much so that they were rendering healers’ medicine ineffective against the attacks of raiders and slave-traders, who were identified as Wadigo. This incident was part of a longer story of conflict. Between 1880 and 1881 a range of people, from the grassroots up to one of the greatest powerbrokers of the region, known as Kibanga, were all in a dispute with the mission over the lime-burning.

The conflict over lime-burning was the culmination, and a particularly striking example, of on-going varied and complex tensions that developed from the UMCA's first visit to Magila in 1867. This lime-burning conflict is a lens into the multiple and ambivalent ways in which local people felt about the mission. At this time, missionaries were extremely vulnerable due to their lack of local knowledge. Yet, simultaneously, missionaries had the potential to be extremely powerful because they were perceived to hold valuable connections with the coast and, thus, access to gunpowder and arms.

Relationships between local powerholders and missionaries were often fraught, but strong – if relatively short-lived – alliances did emerge. Missionaries saw these relationships as foundational to their conversion strategy. Anne Marie Stoner-Eby, working on Masasi in southern Tanzania, suggested that the UMCA only began to gain converts once they responded positively to the chiefs and made alliances with them. The findings here suggest a different story because, in the UMCA stations of Magila, missionaries only began securing a steady flow of converts once they had abandoned their top-down conversion strategy around the time German colonialism began. This is explained at least in part by how Masasi and Magila had different strategies regarding the deployment of ex-slaves. Masasi's development began with a failed experiment to import ex-slaves from Zanzibar, which was abandoned in 1882.