The first modern humans are believed to have inhabited South Africa more than 100,000 years ago. The Atlantic Ocean, for example, has long been a sphere of lively exchanges between Christians in the Americas and Southern Africa, with many amongst the latter group invoking the racial solidarity they experienced with Africans in the Americas, as twentieth-century politician Albert Luthuli’s important visits to Civil Rights-era United States show us. Rather than the elusive notion of the nation-state, the local world of the mission station – or for the fortunate few who owned land themselves, their farms – was the pivot of their Christianity and their daily lives. Despite the significance of missionary-sponsored education, medicine and social work across Southern Africa, not to say the Christian commitments that formed many individuals who became active in nationalist and labour movements, the tendency of the mainstream historiography is to view religion as an uneasy addition to the usual stories of class and capital or, in the more recent historiography of heritage in South Africa, not to consider it at all.29 All of this means that histories of Christianity in Southern Africa have a tendency to occupy a specialised niche in the literature, largely detached from broader political, social and economic narratives.30 This is still the case today, as much as it was the case in 1995 when Richard Elphick argued that Christianity had been treated superficially (his word) in mainstream South African historiography. But the history of South African Christianity is found for the most part in local, or 'micro' narratives, while the highly elaborated 'macro' narratives of colonialism, capitalism, and liberation - the backbone of the conventional histories of South Africa - assign Christianity a marginal role, or no role at all. Shokahle Dlamini’s article reveals the role of US-based mission churches in supporting colonialism in Swaziland, collapsing distinctions between mission churches. Further afield, Africans were critically involved in the interwar period in ecumenical movements like the International Missionary Council, which took a key role in attempts to create a ‘new global order’, one that looked to the emergent human rights regime in the west as a vehicle for social transformation.51 In modern Africa, alongside Yoruba Anglicans’ mobilisation of Christianity for the promotion of a nascent Yoruba-speaking nationalism, we also find the many instances of Protestant organisations that resisted co-option to patriotic causes, instead insisting upon their more expansive identities as citizens of the world – and ultimately of heaven itself. Rarely has Protestantism been placed centre-stage in scholarly analyses of Christian commitment in South Africa. Some of the history of these countries, however, is naturally mentioned in this history of the rest of Africa - but is kept to the minimum needed to make the rest comprehensible. The most read article (collected from online metrics) in the South African Historical Journal is P.S. Contents 1. To receive whole copies of future issues, subscribe here. 26 G. Vahed, ‘Mosques, Mawlanas and Muharram: Indian Islam in Colonial Natal, 1860–1910’, Journal of Religion in Africa 31, 3 (2001), 305–335; G.H. At the turn of the 20th century, Christianity was virtually nonexistent in many parts of Africa but is now the faith of the majority. The New Testament of the Bible mentions several events in which Africans were witnesses to the life of Christ and the ministry of the apostles. The same point can be made about the oral traditions of specific churches. Traditionally, historical writing on the history of South Africa has been divided into broad categories or historiographical schools, namely a British imperialist, a settler or colonialist, an Afrikaner nationalist, a liberal and a revisionist or 4.12 Christianity and other faiths 111 Name Index 112 Subject Index 122 (ix) Introduction GENERAL BACKGROUND In presenting this supplement to the History of the Church in Southern Africa: A select bibliography of published materiaI to 1980 the compilers would like to draw attention to certain matters. Volume 2: 1885–1994. Sundkler defined the former group as interested in African autonomy in ecclesial affairs but essentially loyal to the theology and practices of the Western mission churches: ‘their church organization and Bible interpretation are largely copied from the patterns of the Protestant Mission Churches from which they have seceded.’ The second group – Zionist Christians – were cast as far more daring in their willingness to experiment with incorporating local culture and tradition into their Christianity: ‘theologically, the Zionists are now a syncretistic Bantu movement.’8 It is important to note that even while formulating a typology that would over time come to be used in increasingly restrictive ways by scholars, Sundkler himself recognised the limitations of the categories. EMBED. Keywords: Africa, Christianity, Civilizations, Colonialism, Imperialism, Independence, Islam, Sahara, Transatlantic Slave Trade. History. 27 T. Lodge, Black Politics in South Africa since 1945 (Longman: London, 1983); and more recently T. Simpson, Umkhonto We Sizwe: The ANC’s Armed Struggle (Cape Town: Penguin Books, 2016). Page 1 of 5 African Christianity African Christianity When I was a seminary student during the late fifties and early sixties, I had the opportunity to attend mission conferences in the Toronto area. Christianity arrived in South Africa with settlers from Europe, starting with Jan van Riebeeck in 1652, when Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC, Dutch East India Company) authorized him to establish a post to resupply food and fuel to ships traveling between the Netherlands and Southeast and South Asia. 54 R. Elphick, The Equality of Believers: Protestant Missionaries and the Racial Politics of South Africa (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012). 17 A. Ukah, ‘Re-Imagining the Religious Fields: The Rhetoric of Nigerian Pentecostal Pastors in South Africa’, in M. Echtler and A. Ukah, eds, Bourdieu in Africa: Exploring the Dynamics of Religious Fields (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 70–95. But, the nation-state was not the sole nor even the most important catalyst for the formation of Christians’ imagination, nor did the boundaries of the territories of the colonial era or the Bantustans of the apartheid state determine the borders of Christian piety. Christianity, the faith of almost three-quarters of the diverse South African population, has long been pushed to the margins of historical writing on South Africa, yet for more than two centuries it has shaped South African society and its diverse subcultures. While Christians may have come to represent a majority religious group in South Africa over the course of the twentieth century, there were also significant religious minorities, and the history of Christians’ interactions with these groups is a largely untold story. 11 N. Erlank, “‘Brought into Manhood”: Christianity and Male Initiation in South Africa in the Early Twentieth Century’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 43, 2 (2017), 251–65; E. Elbourne, Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions, and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799–1853, ed. This is an expansive, malleable term that does not carry with it predetermined notions of what ‘counts’ in terms of public action, yet it still prioritises the process by which people, ideas, events and practices move outside of the private realm to assume public mass significance.55 One of the themes of this special issue is the way in which the personal, interior piety of many Christians has had enormously transformative social consequences and effects. I. McKenna, Amy, 1969 DT1079.H57 2011 968—dc22 2010019433 On the cover: Xhosa boys prepare for a traditional manhood ceremony in South Africa. Also in the vein of emphasising continuities across Protestant denominations, while much recent scholarship focuses on the novelty of supposedly globalised Pentecostalism, some of the authors contained here argue for the transnational scope of many of the older Protestant denominations, many with international reach of their own, and with a still greater numerical preponderance than the Pentecostal churches. Moreover, there is a long tradition of history – especially in South Africa – as an activist Marxist-inflected discipline, part of the broader project of undermining the legitimacy of the apartheid state and subverting its official and unofficial historians’ narratives of Afrikaner supremacy and conquest.28 While it is undeniably the case that since the 1980s much social history has been carried out alongside research into political economy, capitalism and the state, the place of Christianity in this radical Marxist strand of history is nonetheless a deeply ambivalent one, vulnerable to the suspicion that religious commitment embodies false consciousness. In fact, the contemporary South African fascination with land restitution as an end in itself disguises how, for many, land was useless without accompanying mortar and bricks. South African History Time-Line . 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