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Revisiting ‘Translatability’ and African Christianity: The Case of the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church in Zion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 May 2017

Joel Cabrita
Joel Cabrita*
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
*
*Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge, CB3 9BS. E-mail: [email protected].
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Abstract

Focusing on the ‘translatability’ of Christianity in Africa is now commonplace. This approach stresses that African Christian practice is thoroughly inculturated and relevant to local cultural concerns. However, in exclusively emphasizing Christianity's indigeneity, an opportunity is lost to understand how Africans entered into complex relationships with North Americans to shape a common field of religious practice. To better illuminate the transnational, open-faced nature of Christianity in Africa, this article discusses the history of a twentieth-century Christian faith healing movement called Zionism, a large black Protestant group in South Africa. Eschewing usual portrayals of Zionism as an indigenous Southern African movement, the article situates its origins in nineteenth-century industrializing, immigrant Chicago, and describes how Zionism was subsequently reimagined in a South African context of territorial dispossession and racial segregation. It moves away from isolated regional histories of Christianity to focus on how African Protestantism emerged as the product of lively transatlantic exchanges in the late modern period.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 53: TRANSLATING CHRISTIANITY , June 2017 , pp. 448 - 475
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2017 

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Footnotes

My thanks to the Ecclesiastical History Society for giving me the opportunity to present an earlier version of this article at their Winter 2016 meeting. I am grateful for the comments of the anonymous reviewer, and to the editorial team for their input. I would also like to acknowledge the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the form of an Early Career Fellowship.

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122 Cabrita, Empire of Healing, ch. 8.