Redeeming the African in the African Orthodox Church in South Africa

In 1924, Reverend Daniel Williams Alexander, a Martinican descendant, staunch Garveyite, and leader of the Kimberley branch of the African Orthodox Church, left the Cape for New York. He made it his mission to be consecrated as the Archbishop and Primate of his church in South Africa. During his journey, he also hoped to find much more than religious or political solidarity among his Caribbean colleagues who had founded the church in America. Yet his colleagues’ deep desires to “redeem Africa” prevented them from recognizing Alexander as an ecclesiastical authority, much less as a person with a shared Caribbean heritage and experience. Alexander never found that camaraderie. His American counterparts, on the other hand, were primarily invested in him performing a limited and primitive expression of African identity—one very much in need of salvation and redemption from the church. They relied on Alexander’s authentic “Africanness” to validate their larger ecclesiastical mission to rescue Africa. Alexander was unwilling to yield to their definitions of African identity. Ironically, however, in South Africa he practiced a similar form of cultural superiority when he cast his coloured congregation as “superior” to the east and central Africans he actively sought to proselytize and “rescue.” Tshepo Masango Chéry’s paper takes up these concerns by examining the ways that church leaders in the U.S. and in South Africa both depended on and equally disapproved of  “ideas of Africanness” to establish the African Orthodox Church in Africa. Ultimately, it wrestles with the differing expectations of African identity that African Americans, Afro-Caribbeans, and South Africans wielded as they attempted to solidify a project of black Christian solidarity.