| Founded by free blacks in Philadelphia in the years after the American Revolution, the African Methodist Episcopal Church was the United States' first and, for most of the nineteenth century, its largest black independent church. A hundred years after its founding, the AME Church entered the South African mission field, initially by absorbing a small "Ethiopian" congregation in Pretoria. For a complex set of reasons, this venerable African-American church found fertile soil in southern Africa. By the dawn of the twentieth century, AME congregations stretched from the docks of Cape Town to the kingdom of the Barotse, north of the Zambesi.;"Our Fathers, Our Children: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa," traces this remarkable historical convergence from both sides of the Atlantic. It is essentially a study of transplantation, which explores the process by which Africans appropriated and transformed an African-American institution and creed. While the focus is on a particular church, the study also seeks to illuminate the broader process of intellectual and cultural interchange between black America and black South Africa during the years between 1890 and 1930. By focusing on fields as diverse as music, politics and education, the dissertation helps recover a neglected chapter of African and African-American social and intellectual history, while offering a number of insights for practicioners of the discipline of comparative history. |
