KINGDOM COME, the politics of faith and freedom in segregationist South Africa and beyond

247pp., paperback, Duke University Press, Durham, 2023

ISBN: 9781478019930

Tshepo Masango Chéry on how early twentieth-century Black Christian activists used faith as a strategy in the fight against racial and colonial oppression in South Africa and beyond.

“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 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

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