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 response to their inflexibility. The second episode is about the most successful white evangelist in Mapumulo, who worked on behalf of a mission organisation without being officially involved in it. The mission organisation therefore had no control over his activities, so that he could practice a heterodoxy that, ironically, in a short period aroused among Africans more interest in missionary Christianity than more conventional missionaries had been able to provoke. The third episode is the Poll Tax Rebellion of 1906, in which the missionaries’ narrow definition of Christianity obscured the depth of Christian participation and the rebels’ appropriations of colonial evangelism. In each case, a world of African Christian activity emerged outside of, but not necessarily in opposition to, the domain of missionary authority. This is not surprising, given the fact that in Mapumulo white missionaries were absent, or at least outnumbered by, black preachers, even in the churches linked to overseas mission organisations.