Description
Book SynopsisIn
Kingdom Come, Tshepo Masango Chéry charts a new genealogy of early twentieth-century Black Christian activists who challenged racism in South Africa before the solidification of apartheid by using faith as a strategy against global racism. Masango Chéry traces this Black freedom struggle and the ways that South African church leaders defied colonial domination by creating, in solidarity with Black Christians worldwide, Black-controlled religious institutions that were geared toward their liberation. She demonstrates how Black Christians positioned the church as a site of political resistance and centered specifically African visions of freedom in their organizing. Drawing on archival research spanning South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya, the United Kingdom, and the United States, Masango Chéry tells a global story of the twentieth century that illuminates the formations of racial identity, state control, and religious belief. Masango Chéry’s recent
Trade Review“Tshepo Masango Chéry’s
Kingdom Come is a fascinating exploration of Christianity as a subversive, anti-imperial force in the twentieth century. With South Africa as generative source, Masango Chéry follows a circuitry of individuals and ideas connecting Africa to the Caribbean and North America, including Ethiopianism, the Garvey movement, and the African Orthodox Church. As such,
Kingdom Come is a signal contribution across multiple registers that include African diasporic, South African, Black liberation, and religious studies.” -- Michael A. Gomez, Silver Professor of History, New York University
“Tshepo Masango Chéry’s
Kingdom Come centers Africa and Africans in an expansive nineteenth- and twentieth-century black internationalist religious movement that laid the groundwork for Bishop Desmond Tutu and Reverend Allan Boesak’s liberationist ‘theologies of refusal’ in the global anti-apartheid struggle.
Kingdom Come is a refreshing rejoinder to insular South African histories disconnected from the rest of the African continent, instead centering South Africa in the multidirectional flows of Christian-identified black peoples, foundational religious institutions, and liberationist ideologies to and from southern, and eastern Africa, the United States, and the Caribbean.” -- Robert Trent Vinson, author of * The Americans Are Coming!: Dreams of African American Liberation in Segregationist South Africa *
Table of ContentsAbbreviations ix
Tlhompo/Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: Thy Kingdom Come on Earth 1
1. “My Blood Is a Million Stories”: The Making of Coloured Identity 13
2. Faith of Our Fathers: The Ethiopian Movement and African Identities 29
3. In the Name of the Father: The Manye Sisters and Church Formation 54
4. Ministries of Migration: George McGuire, Robert Josias Morgan, and the Transformation of Black Churches in the West Indies and the United States 83
5. Garvey’s God: Racial Uplift and the Creation of the African Orthodox Church 105
6. “We See on the Horizon the Sun of African Orthodoxy”: Church Growth in Southern Africa 122
7. Seeds of Freedom: Growing Orthodoxy and Freedom in East Africa 151
Epilogue: Thy Will Be Done 179
Notes 187
Bibliography 219
Index 239
