The Millennium Comes to Mapumulo: Popular Christianity in Rural Natal, 1866-1906

There was more to African religious life in rural colonial Natal than mission orthodoxy, traditionalism, or independent Christianity. Many people became involved in mission Christianity without fully submitting to missionary authority. The story of these ‘adherents’ has yet to be written, for historians have focused on the prosperous, westernised, orthodox African Christians who lived on Natal’s most famous mission stations. In districts like Mapumulo, however, where colonial evangelism seemed to the missionaries to be struggling most, many Africans sought the material and spiritual benefits of colonial evangelism without becoming church members themselves. In fact, missionaries spent more time keeping Africans out of Christianity than dragging or luring them in, as is evident in three episodes in the history of Christianity in colonial Mapumulo. The first episode concerns the first independent church in Natal, which emerged in Mapumulo around I890, not as a rejection of the missionaries, but rather as a ...