Overview

In Kingdom Come, Tshepo Masango Chery 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 Chery 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 Chery tells a global story of the twentieth century that illuminates the formations of racial identity, state control, and religious belief. Masango Chery's recentering of South Africa in the history of worldwide Black liberation changes understandings of spiritual and intellectual routes of dissemination throughout the diaspora.

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9781478019930

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Reviews

Tshepo Masango Chery'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 Chery 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 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 the Bishop Desmond Tutu and Rev. 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 *

Author Information

Tshepo Masango Chéry is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Houston.

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