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ABSTRACT
This article traces the course of the secession of John Msikinya from the Primitive Methodist Church in 1908. Msikinya was feted by the church as one of its first African ministers and toured the UK in 1899 to raise funds for the development of the church in Aliwal North. Denied further advancement, in particular leadership of his congregation unsupervised by English ministers, Msikinya’s relationship with European ministers and lay church leaders deteriorated. He was expelled, taking with him a significant part of his congregation. Msikinya established his own church, the Native Presbyterian Church of South Africa, and was still active in Aliwal North in the 1920s. The secession had a dispiriting effect on the Primitive Methodists’ missionary work in South Africa. Msikinya’s experience is familiar from the careers of other African ministers in the period 1880–1910. Msikinya’s case is distinguished by the tenacity with which he sought to remain a Primitive Methodist and his efforts to use the church’s procedures to bolster his case. Against a background of growing constraints on the Europeanised African elite to which Msikinya belonged, his secession demonstrated the inability of the missionary church to devolve leadership to the local community.
Notes
1 Primitive Methodist, 25 May 1899. The Primitive Methodist Connexion (as the organisation was known until 1902 when it renamed itself the Primitive Methodist Church) split from the Wesleyan Methodists in 1807. It became the second biggest Methodist church in the United Kingdom (UK) and at its peak in 1900 had 210,000 members. Its members and officials in the UK were generally drawn from poorer parts of British society than the Wesleyans, with strong representation amongst agricultural workers, miners, and fishing communities. See D.W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (Unwin Hyman: London, 1989); D. Hempton Methodism: Empire of the Spirit (Yale University Press: Yale, 2006); H. McLeod, Religion and Society in England, 1850–1914 (Longman: London, 1996).
2 Primitive Methodist, 7 December 1899.
3 Primitive Methodist, 8 June; Primitive Methodist, 27 July 1899; Primitive Methodist, 31 August 1899; Primitive Methodist, 14 September 1899; Primitive Methodist, 12 January 1900; School of Oriental and African Studies Archives, University of London, Primitive Methodist Missionary Society Archive (hereafter PMMS), General Missionary Committee (hereafter GMC), Minutes, 23 March 1900.
4 John Smith (1840–1915), from Norfolk, UK, served in Aliwal North from 1874 to 1878 and again from 1882 to 1888. Smith became secretary to the General Missionary Committee (GMC) in 1894. Geoff Dickinson, ‘Smith, John (1840–1915)’, My Primitive Methodists, https://www.myprimitivemethodists.org.uk/content/people-2/primitive_methodist_ministers/s-2/john_smith, accessed 6 October 2021.
5 Primitive Methodist, 25 May 1899.
6 Frederick Pickering (1863–1935) served in Africa for two periods: 1892–1901 and 1905–1910. On his final return to England, he continued to work as a minister, largely in the north of England, until his retirement in 1927. Geoff Dickinson, ‘Pickering, Fred (1863–1935)’, My Primitive Methodists, https://www.myprimitivemethodists.org.uk/content/people-2/primitive_methodist_ministers/p/fred_pickering, accessed 6 October 2021.
7 Msikinya is not mentioned, for instance, in the Primitive Methodists’s most comprehensive history by Holliday Kendall. H.B. Kendall, History of the Primitive Methodist Church (London: Joseph Johnson, 1919). Nor is Msikinya’s secession discussed in studies of South African churches in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including C.C. Crais, White Supremacy and Black Resistance in Pre-Industrial South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); A. Hastings, The Church in Africa, 1450–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); R. Elphick and R. Davenport, eds, Christianity in South Africa: A Political, Social and Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); B.G.M. Sundkler, Bantu Prophets in South Africa (Cambridge: James Clarke); or W. Beinart and C. Bundy, Hidden Struggles in Rural South Africa: Politics and Popular Movements in the Transkei and the Eastern Cape 1890–1930 (London: James Currey, 1987).
8 PMMS, GMC, Minutes, 23 December 1868; PMMS, GMC, Minutes, 15 October 1869; H. Roe, Mission to Africa: Being Sketches of Places, People, Providence and Personal Experience (London: F.H. Hurd, 1873), 17.
9 The town of Aliwal North was founded in 1850. It was named in commemoration of the British victory in the Sikh War at Aliwal in the Punjab in 1846 under the command of Sir Harry Smith, who became governor of Cape Colony the following year. The railway from East London reached Aliwal North in 1885. There was a small diamond working, but the town was principally an administrative centre, and its economy was dominated by agriculture. By the end of the century, the principal employers were flour mills and dairies. Anon, Aliwal North, ‘Queen of the Border’ (Aliwal North: Burgess and Sutherland, 1929).
10 Primitive Methodist Missionary Society, Atlas of the Primitive Methodist Missions in Africa (London: Primitive Methodist Missionary Society, 1920).
11 For example, Msikinya was recommended to the minister George Butt by the principal at Lovedale (see below), and Butt modelled the training school at Aliwal North on that of the Paris Evangelical Mission. Kendall, History of the Primitive Methodist Church, vol. 2, 497.
12 J.T. Campbell, Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa, revised edition (Charlotte: University of North Carolina Press, March 1998), 113.
13 S.M. Brock, ‘James Stewart and Lovedale: A Reappraisal of Missionary Attitudes and African Response in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, 1870–1905’ (PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1974), 180.
14 For example, Sol Plaatje saw little prospect of advancement in the Post Office or the court service and left government employment to become a journalist in 1902. Brian Willan, Sol Plaatje: A Life of Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje, 1876–932 (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2018), 149.
15 Quoted in Brock, ‘James Stewart and Lovedale’, 386.
16 Report of the South African Native Affairs Commission, 1903–1905 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1905), 46–47.
17 Missionary Herald, 1908.
18 Les Switzer, Power and Resistance in an African Society (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 145.
19 The Primitive Methodists did not formally constitute a missionary society, although the term was used by them from 1843. See (Wesleyan) Methodist Missionary Society Archive, School of Oriental and African Studies Archives, University of London, ‘Description of Primitive Methodist Conference; General Missionary Committee, Primitive Methodist Missionary Society, 1863–1934’, https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/data/gb102-mms/mms/pmms, accessed 4 May 2023.
20 Edgar discusses the need to ‘read against the grain’ of the missionary sources in his study of the Bulhoek Massacre. R.R. Edgar, The Finger of God (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018), 8.
21 W. Taylor, Christianity and the Natives of South Africa: A Year-Book of South African Missions (General Missionary Conference of South Africa, 1927), 84.
22 For example, the Committee wrote to the chief and under-secretaries for the colonies to tell them that they ‘deeply deplore the unhappy war in South Africa between the natives and the company chartered by the British Government.’ PMMS, GMC, Minutes, 17 November 1893.
23 J.L. Comaroff and J. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, Vol. 2: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 7, see also 28–29.
24 Campbell, Songs of Zion, 271.
25 J. Cabrita, Text and Authority in the South African Nazaretha Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 11.
26 Sundkler, Bantu Prophets.
27 J. Cabrita and N. Erlank, ‘New Histories of Christianity in South Africa: Review and Introduction’, South African Historical Journal, 70, 2 (2018), 314.
28 J. Fletcher Hurst, The History of Methodism (New York: Eaton and Mains, 1902), 604. The Mfengu had fled the Zulu invasions (Mfecane) and were subsequently settled in land ruled by the British in the eastern Cape. Many were converted to Wesleyan Methodism after 1835.
29 The subject of this article is to be distinguished from John I. Msikinya (c.1877–1913) who attended Lincoln College in Philadelphia, United States, in 1903–1904, became a bishop of the Church of God and Saints of Christ, and influenced Enoch Mgijima, leader of a Zionist church known as the Israelites. See Edgar, Finger of God, 56. Campbell writes at length about David’s son Henry Msikinya in his study of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Henry was sent to the college of the African Methodist Episcopalian Church in Wilberforce, Ohio, and after his return in 1901 became principal of the Wilberforce Institute near Johannesburg. Henry’s brother Jonas was a court interpreter. Campbell says no more about John, the subject of this study, than that he was educated at Lovedale. Campbell, Songs of Zion, 271. Three other Msikinyas – Elizabeth (b.1868), Martha (b.1861) and Dorcas (b.1868) – also attended Lovedale in the 1870s, but their relationship to John is not clear. J. Stewart, Lovedale Past and Present (Lovedale: Mission Press, 1887), 468.
30 Brock, ‘Stewart and Lovedale’, 169. Switzer notes that by 1877, only one of 220 African male students at Lovedale studied classical languages even though these were needed for success in government service examinations. Switzer, Power and Resistance, 35.
31 It is not apparent why the Msikinyas were not accepted for the mission. Brock, ‘Stewart and Lovedale’, 114. R. Young, African Wastes Reclaimed: Illustrated in the Story of the Lovedale Mission (London: Dent 1902), 131; Christian Express, 1 August 1918. Sana Mzimba attended Lovedale from 1868 until 1872 before accompanying Mrs James Stewart on a visit to Scotland, where she spent three years. On her return, she married John Msikinya at Burnshill. She taught at the Native Girls’ School in Gqumahashe before she and her husband were sent to Aliwal North. Stewart, Lovedale Past and Present, 468. Stewart does not mention whether Sana was related to P. J. Mzimba.
32 In the same year William Barleycorn was ordained as the first Primitive Methodist African minister in Fernando Po. Primitive Methodist, 25 May 1899.
33 ‘Our South African Mission Work’, Primitive Methodist Magazine, 1882, 125–126.
34 PMMS, GMC, Minutes, 29 January 1892. After Msikinya’s dismissal from the ministry, the superintendent minister, Frederick Pickering, ensured that he was also dismissed from the jail chaplaincy. George Ayre, Pickering’s successor, thought there was little chance of another ‘native appointment’ after ‘Msikinya’s harlequinade’, and the post went to a Dutch Reformed minister. PMMS, Ayre to Guttery, 21 November 1910 and 2 January 1911.
35 Primitive Methodist sources attributed the initiative for the new Location church to Butt. See, for example, C. Crabtree, Our South African Field (London: Primitive Methodist Church, 1926), 3. George Edwin Butt (1841–1920), from Motcombe, Dorset, became a minister in 1862, serving in circuits in England before going to Aliwal North in 1888. On his return from Africa in 1905, he was elected president of the Primitive Methodist Conference. He retired from the ministry in 1910. Geoff Dickinson, ‘Butt, George Edwin (1841–1920)’, My Primitive Methodists, https://www.myprimitivemethodists.org.uk/content/people-2/primitive_methodist_ministers/b/george_edwin_butt, accessed 6 October 2021.
36 Primitive Methodist, 25 May 1899; Rev. J. Atkinson, ‘Our Conference Chronicle’, Primitive Methodist Magazine, 1899; ‘The Connexional Outlook’, Primitive Methodist Magazine, 1899, 718; G.E. Butt, ‘Opening of the New Church at Aliwal North’, The Herald, March 1905; PMMS, Butt to Guttery, 16 September 1910; PMMS, Pickering to Pickett, 8 May 1905.
37 The Connexion’s resistance to autonomous governance of African congregations was also in evidence when it rejected a request from the African minister William Barleycorn for permission to set up a committee of management at Santa Isabel on the grounds that such an arrangement was not ‘opportune’. PMMS, GMC, Minutes, 24 April 1907.
38 PMMS, Butt to Pickett, 28 September 1903.
39 G.A. Duncan, ‘“African Churches Willing to Pay Their Own Bills”: The Role of Money in the Formation of Ethiopian-Type Churches with Particular Reference to the Mzimba Secession’, African Historical Review, 45, 2 (2013), 52–54.
40 Switzer, Power and Resistance, 117–118.
41 Du Plessis, cited Duncan ‘African Churches Willing to Pay’.
42 Richard Elphick, The Equality of Believers (Durban: University of Kwa Zulu-Natal Press, 2012), 87.
43 Duncan, ‘African Churches Willing to Pay Their Own Bills’, 71.
44 The general missionary secretary of the Wesleyan Methodist Church of South Africa considered that a lack of preparation of African ministers in financial management remained an issue in 1925: ‘So often the trouble arises in administration over financial matters, and it is not so much a question of bad intention and evil misuse of money by the Native officer, as it is just capacity to manage money matters. There has been no sufficiently developed financial capacity. And can we wonder? It is so recent that the Bantu first handled our coinage. White Missionaries and Native leaders must have patience and persistence of steady effort, after that true fitness really to administer Church life and money.’ A. Lea, The Native Separatist Church Movement in South Africa (Cape Town: Juta [1927]), 53–54.
45 A. Hastings, The Church in Africa, 1450–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1994), 362.
46 PMMS, GMC, Minutes, 17 April 1890; PMMS, Mabile to GMC, 31 July 1891; PMMS, Butt to Smith, 18 December 1898; PMMS, GMC, Minutes, 4 November 1898; PMMS, Bryant to GMC, 13 January 1903; PMMS, Waite to GMC, 7 June 1905; Primitive Methodist, 14 September 1899; PMMS, Pickering to Pickett, 6 January 1908; PMMS, Pickering to GMC, 3 August 1909.
47 PMMS, Msikinya Butt to Pickett, 28 September 1903.
48 William Nathaniel Somngesi (1852–1911) was born in Grahamstown. His father was a Wesleyan evangelist, and his maternal grandfather was one of the first Mfengu converts in the 1830s. Trained at Wesleyan day and Sunday schools in Grahamstown, Somngesi became a court interpreter in 1868 and worked in a general store in Port Elizabeth. Having become a Wesleyan local preacher, he returned to Grahamstown in 1875 where he worked as a teacher, before moving to the King Williamstown district to teach. John Smith recruited him as an evangelist for an outstation at Rouxville in the early 1880s. By this time he was married to John Msikinya’s sister Cecelia Mary, though he later remarried. He became a minister in 1891. ‘Sketch by G.E. Butt’, Christian Messenger, 84 (1918).
49 PMMS, Butt to Picket, 28 September 1903.
50 PMMS, Butt to Pickett, 28 September 1903; PMMS, GMC, Minutes, 26 April 1904; PMMS, GMC, Minutes, 26 July 1904. No reason for the changed decision is recorded.
51 The chair of the Queenstown Wesleyan circuit wrote to Pickering that ‘the native population has also been affected by the spirit of what is known amongst us as “Ethiopianism”, which has led to much strife and division, and the ultimate result has been that Wesleyan Methodist Natives who have removed in considerable numbers to Aliwal North have clamoured for their own services and institutions’. Cited in PMMS, Pickering to Pickett, 15 April 1907. See also PMMS, Nuttall to Pickett, 17 September 1907; PMMS, GMC, Minutes, 22 January 1908; The Missionary Herald, September 1908, 119–120.
52 PMMS, Kidwell to Pickering, 13 December 1905.
53 PMMS, Msikinya to GMC, 18 May 1909.
54 PMMS, GMC, Minutes, 23 January 1902; A. Baldwin, A Missionary Outpost in Central Africa (London: W.A. Hammond, 1928), 49; W. Chapman A Pathfinder in South Central Africa (London: Hammond, 1910), 125.
55 ‘The Connexional Outlook; Rev. George E. Butt’s Successor’, Primitive Methodist Magazine, 1904, 498.
56 Butt’s doubts were to be vindicated, but he was not without his own interest in the case. Apart from possible considerations about preserving his own legacy, his son, George H. Butt, was also a minister and had taken responsibility for the school. PMMS, Butt to Pickett, 29 April 1904.
57 PMMS, Guttery to Hartley, 14 August 1908. Arthur Thomas Guttery (1862–1920) was born in Birmingham, the son of a Primitive Methodist minister. He attended the Wesleyan Elmfield College and London University and worked as minister until his appointment as GMC secretary in 1908. He served in this position until 1913. He became president of the Primitive Methodist Conference in 1916 and of the National Council of the Evangelical Free Churches in 1919. G. Dickinson, ‘Guttery, Arthur Thomas D.D. (1862–1920)’, My Primitive Methodists, https://www.myprimitivemethodists.org.uk/content/people-2/primitive_methodist_ministers/g/arthur_thomas_guttery_dd, accessed 4 May 2023.
58 PMMS, Guttery to Pickering, 15 August 1908.
59 PMMS, Pickering to Pickett, 21 January 1907.
60 PMMS, Pickering to Guttery, 6 September 1908 and 9 August 1909.
61 PMMS, GMC, Minutes, 23 February 1905; PMMS, Pickering to GMC, 3 August 1909; PMMS, Pickering to Mitchell, 25 December 1905 and 12 January 1906.
62 James Pickett (1853–1918), secretary of the GMC from 1903 to 1908 and president of the Primitive Methodist Conference in 1908, was born at Berwick Bassett, Wiltshire. He worked in circuits in England but never served in an overseas mission. G. Dickinson, ‘Pickett, James (1853–1918)’, My Primitive Methodists, https://www.myprimitivemethodists.org.uk/content/people-2/primitive_methodist_ministers/p/james_pickett, accessed 4 May 2023.
63 PMMS, Pickering to Guttery, 29 August 1910.
64 PMMS, Guttery to Pickering, 4 December 1909.
65 PMMS, Edwin Smith papers, ‘A Visit to Aliwal North’, n.d. [1902].
66 PMMS, Guttery to Pickering, 4 December 1909; PMMS, Guttery to Pickering, 15 August 1908 and 18 September 1909.
67 PMMS, GMC, Minutes, 30 June 1906; PMMS, Pickering to Pickett, 18 May 1908.
68 PMMS, Pickering to Pickett, 3 September 1906, 28 January 1907, and 30 June 1906; PMMS, Pickering to Guttery, Good Friday 1910; PMMS, Pickering to Pickett, 10 December 1906 and 27 May 1907.
69 PMMS, Pickering to Pickett, 6 January 1908, 20 April 1908, and 18 May 1908; PMMS, Msikinya to Pickett, 26 April 1908.
70 The petition stated: ‘We sympathise with him in the financial troubles that have been brought upon him by the action of others, and which we can with confidence assert are due to no act or neglect on his part, but have been ever brought about on his placing reliance on the promises and undertakings of others but wherein he was disappointed AND we pray that the Revd Msikinya may be allowed to continue in the good work he has so far done amongst us, and which we in duty bound will ever pray may through the help of the Lord be carried on as before.’ PMMS, GMC, Minutes, 28 May 1908.
71 PMMS, Pickering to Pickett, 3 May 1908.
72 PMMS, GMC, Minutes, 28 May 1908; PMMS, Aliwal North European Quarterly Meeting, Minutes, 15 June 1908.
73 PMMS, Pickering to Pickett and Guttery, 25 June 1908.
74 The case of Primitive Methodist Church v Msikinya indicates that Duncan is incorrect in claiming that ‘[t]he Free Church of Scotland Mission was the only mission to revert to legal proceedings against a secessionary group’. Duncan, ‘African Churches Willing to Pay Their Own Bills’, 52–54.
75 PMMS, Msikinya to GMC, 4 July 1908.
76 PMMS, GMC, Minutes, 7 July 1908; PMMS, Pickering to Guttery, 27 July 1908. G.E. Butt subsequently published My Travels in North West Rhodesia, or A Missionary Journey of Sixteen Thousand Miles (London: E. Dalton, 1909). The book makes no mention of the Msikinya case.
77 PMMS, Msikinya to Guttery, 24 July 1908.
78 PMMS, Pickering to Guttery, 27 July 1908.
79 PMMS, Guttery to Hartley, 14 August 1908.
80 Pickering to Guttery, 17 August 1908.
81 PMMS, Butt to Guttery, 11 January 1909; PMMS, Letter of the Native Church to GMC, 2 April 1909.
82 PMMS, Msikinya to Butt, 14 December 1908.
83 PMMS, Pickering to Guttery, 4 January 1909, 17 August 1908, and 6 September 1908; PMMS, Guttery to Butt, 30 September 1908 and 26 October 1908.
84 PMMS, GMC Executive Committee to Pickering, 12 March 1909.
85 PMMS, Guttery to Pickering, 2 January 1909; PMMS, GMC, Minutes, 1 March 1909; PMMS, Msikinya to Pickering and Osler, 15 March 1909.
86 PMMS, ‘Open letter from the PMMS to the Native Church at Aliwal North’, n.d. [1909].
87 PMMS, Pickering to Guttery, 22 March 1909.
88 PMMS, Pickering to Guttery, 22 March 1909; PMMS, Msikinya to Guttery, 22 March 1909; PMMS, Pickering to Guttery, 29 March 1909; PMMS, Msikinya to Guttery, 24 March 1909; PMMS, Pickering to Msikinya, 29 March 1909; PMMS, Pickering to Guttery, 10 May 1909.
89 PMMS, Pickering to Msikinya, 7 April 1909.
90 PMMS, Msikinya to Pickering, 9 April 1909.
91 Ibid.
92 This led to a further case before the magistrates. Msikinya was alleged to have commissioned two youths to remove the padlocks, and they were charged with theft and damage to property. Their defence was that the church belonged to and had been paid for by the congregation and that no white minister had preached there for five years. The magistrate urged the withdrawal of the case since the charge of damage could not be proved as the congregation was only asserting what it believed to be its rights. Pickering was asked to get a letter from the Municipal Council confirming the Connexion’s title over the Location church, and in the meantime warned against any further trespass. PMMS, Ayre to Guttery, 22 August 1910; PMMS, Pickering to Guttery, 29 August 1910.
93 PMMS, Somngesi to Pickering, 7 April 1909.
94 PMMS, Pickering to Msikinya, 7 April 1909; PMMS, Pickering to Guttery, 12 April 1909; PMMS, Somngesi to Pickering, 7 April 1909; PMMS, Pickering to Guttery, 26 April 1909, 17 May 1909, and 21 June 1909.
95 PMMS, Guttery to Pickering, 3 June 1909; PMMS, Guttery to Welford, 9 June 1909; PMMS, Pickering to Guttery, 26 June 1909.
96 George Ayre (1870–1914) was born in Burnham, UK, and educated at Elmfield College and Hartley College, Manchester. He became a minister in 1892, serving in various locations in England, and was appointed as superintendent minister at Aliwal North in 1910. There he became active in public life as chairman of the hospital board, town councillor, and leader of a musical society. He returned to England in 1923 and was the financial secretary of the GMC until his retirement in 1939. G. Dickinson, ‘Ayre, George (1870–1944)’, My Primitive Methodists, https://www.myprimitivemethodists.org.uk/content/people-2/primitive_methodist_ministers/a-2/george_ayre, accessed 4 May 2023. Crabtree, Our South African Field, 11.
97 The records of the Location church property were not registered properly in Butt’s time, largely because Butt was imprecise in how he described the ownership of the property.
98 Aliwal North had had 800 African voters in 1886, 53.8 per cent of the electorate. Switzer, Power and Resistance, 143.
99 PMMS, Ayre to Guttery, 22 August 1910, 17 October 1910, 11 September 1911, and 16 October 1911.
100 PMMS, Pickering to GMC, 30 August 1909; PMMS, Pickering to Guttery, 13 September 1909; PMMS, Ayre to Guttery, 22 August 1910.
101 PMMS, Pickering to GMC, 3 August 1909 and 3 July 1909. Ayre later alleged that Msikinya was building ‘a fine manse’ but said that it did not get beyond the foundations because he did not pay the builders. PMMS, Ayre to Guttery, 22 August 1910.
102 PMMS, Pickering to Guttery, 17 August 1908 and 5 July 1909.
103 PMMS, Ayre to Guttery, 21 November 1910 and 24 July 1911.
104 Jacob Jameson Mohau (1883–1937) was born at Aliwal North and converted to Christianity during Butt’s time. He was trained as a teacher at Bensonvale Institution in Herschel and subsequently became an evangelist and teacher at Aliwal North. He became a minister at Aliwal North in 1910 but subsequently moved to Johannesburg and, in 1931, to Mafeking. G. Dickinson, ‘Mohau, J Jameson (1883–1937)’, My Primitive Methodists, https://www.myprimitivemethodists.org.uk/content/people-2/primitive_methodist_ministers/m-2/mohau-j-jameson-1883-1937, accessed 4 May 2023. Mohau was accused of child molestation by one of the town’s assistant gaolers, Seeke, a supporter of Msikinya. The church leaders found in Mohau’s favour and expelled Seeke before the case went to the criminal court. Mohau’s acquittal was a cause of great celebration in the church, and Ayre reported the largest congregation in the Location church since the beginning of the troubles. PMMS, Ayre to Guttery, 25 July 1910, 5, 12, and 19 December 1910, and 2 January 1911.
105 The meeting was attended by one African Methodist Episcopal, three Baptist, two Congregational, one Dutch Reformed, one Ethiopian, two Moravian, three South African Presbyterian, three Native African Presbyterian, three United Free Church, and five Wesleyan Methodist ministers.
106 John Knox Bokwe, ‘Report by the Rev. John Knox Bokwe’, Christian Express, 1 December 1911, 12–14.
107 The members of the first executive committee were Simon P. Sihlali (Congregational), Benjamin Dlepu (Wesleyan), Evbeneezer Koti (Baptist), Benjamin Mwazi (Moravian), John Knox Bokwe (Presbyterian), D. D. Tykwadi (Congregational), Tiyo B. Soga (Presbyterian), J. M. Gqamma (Ethiopian), and A. P. Maila (Wesleyan).
108 The text of 1 Kings 17:17–21, according to the King James Version, is: ‘The son of the woman […] fell sick […] no breath left in him: […] [Elijah] cried unto the Lord, […] My God I pray thee, let this child’s soul come into him again.’
109 The conference sent a message of sympathy to the widow of Mzimba, who had died earlier in the year, implying that he too may have attended had he lived. Tsala ea Becoana, 4 November 1911.
110 R. Elphick, The Equality of Believers: Protestant Missionaries and the Racial Politics of South Africa (Pietermaritzburg: University of Kwa Zulu-Natal Press, 2012), 94.
111 One of the attendees was a Mrs J. Phooko. Umteteli wa Bantu, 2 September 1922. On sport, including rugby, and sociability amongst black South Africans at this time, see A. Odendaal ‘South Africa’s Black Victorians: Sport and Society in South Africa in the Nineteenth Century’, in J.A. Mangan, ed., Pleasure, Profit, Proselytism: British Culture and Sport at Home and Abroad 1700–1914 (London: Cass, 1988).
112 Umteteli wa Bantu, 16 December 1922.
113 Crabtree, Our South African Field, 3; K. George, comp., The Christian Handbook of South Africa (Lovedale: Lovedale Press, 1938), 145–158.
114 ‘All your eggs are in this one basket in South Africa. In a year or two you may be fighting for your denominational existence. Aliwal is not what it used to be when the English Church and ourselves divided the place between us and when the war was bringing in natives by the hundred. The revival of trade at Johannesburg is taking all our young people and many heads of families away. […] The natives seem to be aiming at getting a different church for each family, although our own natives are quiet. There has been a great exodus of natives lately. They are returning to Basotoland having tired of town life in some cases, while in any others they are going to the mines. […] [I]f you do not extend you will perish.’ PMMS, Pickering to Guttery, 20 December 1909.
115 PMMS, GMC, Minutes, 24 February 1910; PMMS, GMC, Minutes, 1 September 1910; PMMS, Ayre to Guttery, 9 November 1911.
116 PMMS, Ayre to Guttery, 29 January 1912.
117 PMMS, ‘Report of the Deputation Appointed to Visit the Bwila-Batonga and Aliwal North Missions, 1914’; PMMS, Ayre to Guttery, 27 July 1911; PMMS, Guttery to Ayre, 8 August 1912; G.E. Butt, The Rev. W. N. Somngesi (London: Johnson, n.d.); PMMS, Ayre to Guttery, [January 1911]; PMMS, Guttery to Ayre, 6 March 1911 and 30 November 1911; PMMS, GMC, 23 May 1912; Taylor, Christianity and the Natives of South Africa, 222–223. The same survey found that the Wesleyans and Anglicans each had over 150 African ministers.
118 PMMS, GMC, 19 April 1905; PMMS, Guttery to Pickering, 14 April and 2 June 1910; Primitive Methodist Magazine, 1911, 501.
119 Crabtree reports that in 1926 there were 170 preachers, 2838 members, over 5000 adherents, and 1258 scholars, managed by three European ministers. Crabtree, Our South African Field, 3.
120 The Hartley Lectures were inaugurated in 1897 in tribute to the Primitive Methodist philanthropist and benefactor W. P. Hartley, whose fortune came from the manufacture of jam.
121 J. Pickett, The Modern Missionary Crisis (London: W.A. Hammond, 1913), 73.
122 Crabtree, Our South African Field, 18. Crabtree (1881–1945) was born in Yorkshire and worked in England before going to Aliwal North in 1922. He remained in South Africa for the rest of his life. G. Dickinson, ‘Crabtree, Charles (1881–1945)’, My Primitive Methodists, https://www.myprimitivemethodists.org.uk/content/people-2/primitive_methodist_ministers/c-2/crabtree-charles-1881-1945, accessed 27 October 2021.
123 J. Hodgson, ‘A Battle for Sacred Power: Christian Beginnings among the Xhosa’, in R. Elphick and T.R.H. Davenport, eds, Christianity in South Africa: A Political, Social, and Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 87.
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Jeremy Crump
Jeremy Crump is a visiting research fellow at De Montfort University, Leicester, United Kingdom, and an associate fellow of the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. His doctoral research was into the history of British popular culture in the later nineteenth century. He has published a number of articles on Primitive Methodism, sport, the music hall, and philanthropy. He is a contributor to the History of Parliament Online project on London constituencies and their Members of Parliament during the period 1832–1868.