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MANGANE MAAKE MOKONE |
| What Tiyo Soga postulated as a political and epistemological necessity, the continual historical identification between Africans in Africa and the African in the African diaspora, in his famous essay "What Is The destiny Of The Kaffir Race", which appeared in the King William's Town Gazette and Kaffrarian Banner newspaper of Many 11, 1865, Mangane Maake Mokone was to actualize in his correspondence with Bishop Henry M. Turner, thereby establishing a unity of historical purposes through amalgamation between Ethiopianism and the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. Mokone founded Ethiopianism in 1892 by leading a group of black Methodists in Pretoria in breaking away from the white Wesleyan Methodist Missionay Society. in a true historical sense, Ethiopianism was a search for uniquely African modernistic practices. One of the reasons for the violent dispute was the refusal of white missionaries to fuly ordinate Africans and their adamant opposition to giving African priests ecclesiastical control and power concerning matters of the churches'doctrine. In a text written by his son after the fact, Mokone explained for his secession. Here are some of the reasons out of the fourteen given for secessionism in a document that retrospectively became the Manifesto of the Ethiopian Movement: "Our district meetings have been separated from the Europeans since 1886. And yet we are compelled to have a white chairman and secretary; This separation shows we can't be brothers; In the Transvaal, no Native minister has the right to use the Mission Property. . . . only the whites are supplied with ox-wagons and furniture; The Native minister holds class meetings, prayer meetings, visits the sick, prays for them, preach, bury and teach school, while the white ministers' work is to marry, baptize and administer communion. They will never go to visit the sick or pray for them, and when they die, your Native minister must go to bury your own people. This is not Christianity, not brotherly love, nor friendship. If this is true, then white ministers are unnecessary. . . " (from J. M. Mokone, The Life of Our Founder, Johannesburg, 1935). One of the consequences of this establishing of the independent movement was the need for new affiliatins and new resources. While this struggle was going on, Mangane Maake Mokone's niece, Charlotte Manye Maxeke, managed to take herself way all the way to Wilberforce University in Ohio, an educational institution of the AME Church. From there, she managed to facilitate a correspondence between Mokone in Pretoria and Turner in Atlanta. In a letter of September 18th, 1895, Mokone writes: "My Lord Bishop: We are exceedingly exhilarated to have received your lordship's letter, a kind and most important one, upon which we cannot enough render gratitude with pen and ink, and the contents of which will ever rememberable be to us. . . . We are also thankful for the paper you sent us, The Voice of Missions, which we are determined to subscribe for as soon as you have sent us the explanation as to what will be the subscription to Africa. Your lordship will palliate us for troubling in requesting you to be good enough to send us the polity and constitution of your church and minutes of your conference, as we are desirous to know about your lordship [an illegible word] and send the price of each book sothat we may be able to remit the amount at once as soon as they have reached us. . . . We feel most happy to see that your mission on the western side of Africa is doing good to our country people. May Lord bless His work there" (printed as "Ethiopian Mission" in Voice of Missions, December 1895). This fascination and interest in the historical lessons of New Negro modernity, as mentioned earlier, led to the union of Ethiopianism and the AME Church. Other slightly younger South African intellectuals were to find compelling this vision of modernity coming from United States. John L. Dube, inspired by the example of Booker T. Washington founded the Ohlange Institute in 1901 and the Ilanga lase Natal newspaper in 1903. Taking lessons from his master, Solomon T. Plaatje modelled his Native Life in South Africa (1916) on W. E. B Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Having been taught by Du Bois at Wilberforce University in Ohio in her first year in America in 1894-95, Charlotte Manye Maxeke was to return to South Africa in 1901 and later found the Wilberforce Institute. Appropriating the idea of the Regeneration of Africa from Martin Delany and Alexander Crummell, Pixley ka Isaka Seme in 1905 wrote an essay called "The Regeneration of Africa" which launched the New African Movement in South Africa. When President Nelson Mandela and Deputy-President Thabo Mbeki launched the idea of the 'African Renaissance' at the Organization of African Unity (OAU) Meeting of Heads of State in Tunis on June 15, 1994, they were seeking to complete the construction of Africa modernity which Pixley ka Isaka Seme's manifesto, but white domination had frustrated. Others examples of the consequential interaction between Americans and South Africans could be adduced. Mangane Maake Mokone's extention of his Ethiopian hand across the Atlantic to Bishop Henry Turner's AME Church hand was pathbreaking indeed. So much so indeed, that F. Z. S. Peregrino, the Ghanian who had come directly from the first Pan-African Congress in London in 1900 to spread the ideas of Pan-Africanism in South Africa through his South African Spectator, commissioned an intellectual and biographical sketch of Mangane Maake Mokone for his newspaper. The anonymously written sketch read in part: "The Rev. M. M. Mokone is one of the best known among the Native ministers of religion in South Africa, as well as one of the most deservedly popular, and he possesses a history, too, the interesting and instructive nature of which will, as is usually the case, be perhaps better appreciated by coming generations than by the present. The great African Methodist Episcopal Church which has recently been planted on these shores, and which, unless all signs fail, is certain to become so important a factor in the civilization and enlightenment of the Natives of South Africa, owes much to the subject of this break sketch. Mr. Mokone's education has been as liberal as usually falls to the lot of the averaged educated black man of South Africa, and this has been supplemented by natural gifts of no mean order. After taking the theological course at Maritzburg, natal, Mr. Mokone founded the Church which was known as the Ethiopian Church, and after a number of years of labour among his brethren in various parts of the sub-continent was elected one of the delegates to proceed to America there to press the claims of the South African Native" ("The Father Of The Church: A Popular Native Minister", South African Spectator, September 7, 1901). Indeed, Mangane Maake Mokone was a brilliant intellectual with a deep sense of history. | |