This article discusses the intertwined histories of Christian ecumenism and ethnic nationalism in Swaziland, shedding new light on the importance of Protestant evangelical thought in the formation of nationalist ideology in 20th-century southern Africa. From the 1920s to the 1970s, Swaziland's Zionist Christians sought to amalgamate Swaziland's churches under the a...

This article charts recent developments in the history of Christianity in South Africa, while also offering a corrective to some of the orthodoxy on the history of Christianity. It begins with an account of two workshops in Cambridge and Johannesburg, where all the authors in this special issue presented. The article calls for a move away from overly rigid typologi...

In 1936, Zulu patriot, John Dube, wrote a biography of local Natal prophet, Isaiah Shembe. Dube's biography – ‘UShembe’ – contained multiple authorial voices. Partly written by Dube, material was also contributed by Shembe and his followers. This collaborative literary method illuminates how rival theories of civic virtue interacted in early twentieth-century South...

Twentieth-century Natal and Zululand chiefs' conversions to the Nazaretha Church allowed them to craft new narratives of political legitimacy and perform them to their subjects. The well-established praising tradition of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Zulu political culture had been an important narrative practice for legitimating chiefs; throughout the twentiet...