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Politics, Gender and the Global: New Directions in the History of Christianity in South Africa
Review products
Convening Black intimacy. Christianity, gender, and tradition in early twentieth-century South Africa. By Natasha Erlank. (New African Histories.) Pp. xvi + 272 incl. 12 ills and 2 tables. Athens, Oh: Ohio University Press, 2022. £29.99 (paper). 978 0 8214 2499
A prophet of the people: Isaiah Shembe and the making of a South African Church. By Lauren V. Jarvis. Pp. 440. East Lansing, Mi: Michigan State University Press, 2024. $53.95 (paper). 978 16 118648 47
Kingdom come. The politics of faith and freedom in segregationist South Africa and beyond. By Tshepo Masango Chéry. (Religious Cultures of African and African Diaspora People.) Pp. xiv + 247. Durham, NC–London: Duke University Press, 2023. £23.99 (paper). 978 14 780199 30
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 December 2024
Extract
Two contradictory tendencies mark the historiography of Christianity in South Africa. First, the country has been a rich crucible for important scholarship on Christianity. In a country where 80 per cent of the population currently claim Christian affiliation, it is not hard to imagine why this would be the case. The country has a centuries-old Christian presence, spanning the Protestantism of early Dutch settlers in the Cape to the many European and North American missionaries of all persuasions who descended upon South Africa in subsequent centuries (some estimated that the south-eastern region of Natal in the nineteenth century was the most missionised area in the world at that time). An equally great magnet for scholarship was the size and diversity of the independent church movement in South Africa – or those Christians who broke away from missionary oversight to form Black-led congregations, many affiliated with other Black Christian organisations in the Atlantic world. By the mid-century, thousands of churches labelling themselves as Zionist, Apostolic and Ethiopian filled South Africa and attracted a commensurately rich scholarship; many such studies focused on how Christianity was Africanised via the independent church movement. In a darker vein, a further impetus for scholarly interest was the way in which Protestantism was wielded by (some) Afrikaners to justify the apartheid regime. Unsurprisingly, this led to an expansive twentieth-century literature on state power and Christianity, both social scientific as well as theological. Finally, historical studies in general have tended to cluster more densely in South Africa than is the case for many other regions of the African continent – a phenomenon that is due to the country's thriving research scene and its many tertiary education institutions. Viewed from this perspective, the large number of histories of Christianity in South Africa should be seen as a smaller subset of the extensive scholarship on South Africa itself.
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Footnotes
I would like to thank the Department of History at the University of Houston for their invitation to give a talk in early 2024; I presented a partial and earlier version of this paper on that occasion, and I am grateful for the helpful comments I received from audience members.
References
1 For a sample of important scholarship on Christian missions and missionaries in South Africa see the works of Jim Campbell, Jean and John Comaroff, Elizabeth Elbourne, Richard Elphick, Norman Etherington, Robert Houle, Lize Kriel, Paul Landau and Hlonipha Mokoena.
2 I review the independent church scholarship for South Africa in the introduction to my Text and authority in the South African Nazaretha Church, Cambridge 2014.
3 For example, de Gruchy, John, The church struggle in South Africa, Grand Rapids, Mi 1979Google Scholar.
4 For example, Schoffeleers, Matthew, ‘Ritual healing and political acquiescence: the case of the Zionist Churches in Southern Africa’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute lxi/1 (1991), 1–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Turek, Lauren, To bring the good news to all nations: Evangelical influence on human rights and US foreign relations, Ithaca, NY 2020, ch. viGoogle Scholar.
6 Cabrita, Joel and Erlank, Natasha, ‘New histories of Christianity in South Africa’, South African Historical Journal lx/2 (2018), 315Google Scholar.
7 Etherington, Norman, ‘Recent trends in the historiography of Christianity in Southern Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies xxii/2 (1996), 203Google Scholar.
8 Cabrita and Erlank, ‘New histories of Christianity’, 315.
9 Erlank, N., Convening Black intimacy: Christianity, gender, and tradition in early twentieth-century South Africa, Athens, Oh 2022Google Scholar.
10 For example, the work of Jeff Peires, Janet Hodgson and Elizabeth Elbourne.
11 An important early analysis of this was Sundkler, Bengt, Bantu prophets in South Africa, London 1948Google Scholar.
12 Jarvis, Lauren, A prophet of the people: Isaiah Shembe and the making of a South African Church, East Lansing, Mi 2024, p. xxiiiCrossRefGoogle Scholar.
13 Ibid. 143–4.
14 Erlank, Convening Black intimacy, 3–4.
15 Ibid. 160.
16 Jarvis, Prophet of the people, 65.
17 Etherington, ‘Recent trends in the historiography’, 218–19.
18 Cabrita, Joel, Written out: the silencing of Regina Gelana Twala, Athens, Oh 2023, 7–8Google Scholar.
19 There are important exceptions including Bozzoli, Belinda, Women of Phokeng, London 1991Google Scholar.
20 Cabrita, Text and authority.
21 See the blurb on the back of her book: Muller, Carol, Rituals of fertility and the sacrifice of desire: Nazarite women's performance in South Africa, Chicago, Il 1999Google Scholar.
22 Etherington, ‘Historiography of Christianity’, 205.
23 Erlank, Convening Black intimacy, 160.
24 Cabrita, Joel, The people's Zion: South Africa, the United States, and a transnational faith healing Church, Cambridge, Ma 2018Google Scholar.
25 Chéry, Tshepo Masango, Kingdom come: the politics of faith and freedom in segregationist South Africa and beyond, Durham, NC 2023, 22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
26 Erlank, Convening Black intimacy, 156, 174–5, 177.
27 Ibid. 193.