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Vol. 30:1 ISSN 0160-8460 March 2002
Religion and the Black (South) Atlantic
by David Anthony and Robert Edgar
The Atlantic has been a meeting point for peoples and ideas in the African diaspora for centuries. For example, since the late-19th century, groups of African Americans and Africans in South Africa have developed close ties with each other in a diverse range of areas: politics, economics and business, literature, music, theatre, the arts, and religion. These relationships are especially intriguing because most African Americans trace their ancestry to West and Central Africa, not southern Africa, and because there has not been a large-scale migration of blacks from southern Africa to the United States. Instead, African South Africans and African Americans found common ground in their shared experiences with white domination and segregation in industrializing societies.
As we began researching our documentary collection project to uncover these linkages (see www.founders.howard.edu/reference/bob_edgar_site/index.html), we affirmed the critical role that religion played in shaping interactions between African Americans and black South Africans in the late-19th and early 20th centuries. Both groups sought spiritual answers and explanations about the nature and reasons for white domination.
Africans looked for an understanding of European conquest and intrusions into their ways of life and culture. Desiring alternatives to the control of Christian missions by European missionaries, many Africans were inspired by the accomplishments of African Americans and the autonomy of their churches. African American theologians, searching for an explanation for the brutalities of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery, found one answer through staking out African fields for their evangelical endeavors.
Among the initial religious contributions of African Americans to black South Africans were the musical performances of Orpheus McAdoo's Jubilee Singers. They toured South Africa on three extended visits between 1890 and 1898, appearing before hundreds of black and white audiences. Their concerts, featuring spirituals and folk songs, left indelible impressions on African composers and choirs and their performance styles that are still evident today.
Black South Africans also drew inspiration from the Jubilee Singers because of their accomplishments and the way they carried themselves as equals to whites. Imvo Zabantsundu, the leading African newspaper in South Africa, editorialized in 1890 how the Americans challenged the racial order: "As Africans we are, of course, proud of the achievements of those of our race. Their visit will do their countrymen here no end of good. Already it has suggested reflection to many who, without such a demonstration, would have remained sceptical as to the possibility, not to say probability, of the Natives of this country being raised to anything above remaining as perpetual hewers of wood and drawers of water."
As the Jubilee Singers were touring South Africa in the 1890s, African American missionaries began arriving. The National Baptist Convention founded a mission station in Cape Town in 1894, and the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church and a less well-known body, the Church of God and Saints of Christ, followed suit. The AME established a presence at the invitation of the Ethiopian Church, an African independent church that had broken away from the Wesleyan Methodists.
A common denominator for all the African American denominations was how they interpreted and applied their slave experience in the United States to the African mission field. To them, the suffering they endured as slaves was part of a providential plan to expose them to civilization and Christianity. They had a special responsibility to return to Africa to civilize and uplift the continent. Thus, when Baptist missionary Charles Morris, a Howard University graduate, reached Zululand in 1900, he wrote a piece for the Cleveland Gazette ( March 31, 1900) arguing that "the American Negro had been marvelously preserved and Christianized for a purpose, and that he was destined to play a star part in the great drama of the world's development." In particular, African Americans had to bring their professional skills and entrepreneurial abilities to guide the Zulus on the correct path to progress and civilization.
Africans also welcomed African American missionaries because they offered a possible avenue for attaining higher education, which was closed to black South Africans until the opening of Fort Hare College in 1916. The Baptists and AME clergy were the primary sponsors for at least several hundred African students in the United States, who found places at historically black institutions such as Wilberforce, Tuskegee, Fisk, Hampton, Morehouse, and Lincoln.
The first large group of South Africans to enroll at an American college was a South African choir left stranded in Ohio after their manager mismanaged their finances. AME ministers came to their rescue, and placed the choir members at the AME's Wilberforce College in Ohio, where one of their instructors was W.E.B. du Bois. After they educated him about conditions in South Africa, he sustained a lifelong interest in South Africa's political situation.
Prominent African clergy played a key role in selecting students to go overseas. A Presbyterian minister, Pambani Jeremiah Mzimba, recruited students (most of whom ended up at Lincoln College in Pennsylvania) from the eastern Cape, while Rev. John L. Dube performed a similar role in Zululand. Dube was one of the earliest South Africans trained in the United States. Taking advantage of his associations with American Congregational missionaries in Zululand, he attended Oberlin College in the mid-1880s and returned to Brooklyn a decade later for theological training.
An admirer of Booker T. Washington's philosophy of self-help and industrial education, Dube transplanted the Tuskegee model to South Africa and founded Ohlange Institute in 1901 near Durban. Before returning to South Africa, he penned "A Zulu's Message to Afro-Americans," appealing for African American missionaries to establish a mission presence in South Africa: "If the Afro-American church was awakened to the realization of its religious responsibility and its duty to Africa many missionaries . . . would not only preach the Gospel on Sunday but . . . on six days of the week would teach our people how to handle a plow, build a house, raise sugar cane, tea and coffee."
Madikane Cele posed in Zulu regalia. Photograph from Natalie Curtis, Songs and Tales from the Dark Continent (New York: G. Schirmer, 1920.)
Booker T. Washington's influence can also be seen in the career of one of Dube's prot&#eacute;g&#eacute;s, Madikane Qandiyane Cele, whose family and the Dube's were among the earliest Zulu Christian converts. At Dube's encouragement, Cele attended Slater Industrial School in North Carolina before moving in 1907 to Hampton Institute, where he took the trade's course in wheelwrighting and blacksmithing.
Cele was also a popular attraction as a stage performer and public speaker. Playing on the curiosity of Americans with "primitive" and "uncivilized" societies, he staged a play, "For Unkulunkulu's [God's] Sake," in which he dressed in Zulu garb, played musical instruments, sang Zulu songs, and regaled audiences with tales of growing up hunting "tigers" and other wild beasts. The underlying theme of the play was how mission Christianity could elevate uncivilized Africans.
After graduating from Hampton, Cele was a featured speaker on the lecture circuit. On one occasion he shared a platform at a Chatauqua gathering with two of his heroes, Booker T. Washington and Robert Russa Moton. On a New England tour in late 1913, Cele spoke at Harvard, where he decried the brutality of American football and revealed his plan to "introduce" a milder form of the game as well as basketball and baseball to his African compatriots.
During his years at Hampton, Cele also fell in love with one of his classmates, Julia Smith, from southern Virginia. After marrying in 1913, they journeyed to Cele's home to establish a mission station at Amatata in a rural African reserve about 30 miles from Durban. As we uncovered the story of Madikane's marriage to Julia, we wondered what subsequently happened to the couple. We learned something of their lives through their letters published in the Hampton journal, Southern Workman, but after the First World War, we came across only a few references to them in documents. However, one South African government document related that when Madikane died in the early 1940s, his widow subsequently made plans to resettle in America with several of her children.
With this slender lead, we turned to the Internet for some detective work. We tapped a database compiling all the names and telephone numbers in the United States and typed in the family name, Cele. About a dozen Celes were listed, but as we began calling them, we learned that most of them had arrived in the United States for studies in the 1990s. However, one contact, Joyce Cele of Los Angeles, turned out to be the daughter of Eddison Cele, who had come back to the United States with his mother to Virginia in 1948.
Joyce Cele knew the stories about her Zulu grandfather, but she had lost touch with the rest of the family after her grandmother Julia died in 1973 and her father a year later. Our contact spurred Joyce into action. She searched property records and family documents and eventually tracked down a daughter of Madikane and Julia living in Lynchburg, Virginia. It turned out that her aunt, Joyce Williams, had her own fascinating tale. When Julia planned to leave South Africa in 1948 with Eddison and Joyce, Joyce could not bear to leave and snuck off the ocean liner in Durban harbor at the last moment. However, her mother eventually prevailed on her to immigrate with her husband and daughter in 1962 and join her in Lynchburg. She lives there today.
Once Joyce Cele reestablished contact with her aunt, they organized a reunion in May 2000 that brought together four generations of Celes. A year later, four of the Celes made a homecoming journey to Amatata, where their host was a grandson of John Dube, and where they worshipped at the Congregational church the Celes had founded over a century before. The reunion was joyous and emotional as the participants, African Americans and Africans, marveled at the strange turn of events that reunited them. Perhaps, they wondered, it was all simply part of a Providential Design.
Cele family reunion, Lynchburg, VA, May 2000. Joyce Cele and Joyce Williams, two persons mentioned in the text, are in the middle of the second row. From the collection of Robert Edgar.
David Anthony, University of California Santa Cruz, and Robert Edgar, Howard University, are co-directors of African-American Historical Linkages with South Africa, ca. 1890-1965, an NHPRC-supported project based at Howard University in Washington, DC.
