Tshepo Masango Chéry begins Kingdom Come with an intensely personal story of her childhood in 1980s Soweto, as the daughter of Christian anti-apartheid activists Maake and Pauline Masango. While state violence drove her into exile as a child, her parents’ enduring faith in God and democracy led her to explore the history of the country that had shaped her family. Here, she charts a ‘little-known preapartheid history, when politically conscious Christians believed that the petition for God’s kingdom to come was equal parts prayer and mandate’, casting South African Christians’ activism as ‘a moral project and not just a nation-building one’ (p. 3). Masango Chéry amply reveals how activism could both escape and exceed the terms of state politics and the boundaries of South Africa. When Black Christians left white-led mainline congregations, she demonstrates, they created spaces where they could govern themselves – ‘if not in their country then at least in their churches’ (p. 4). Their intertwined ideas of faith and freedom inspired emancipatory religious projects far afield, across the Atlantic and across British colonial Africa.

Kingdom Come thus persuasively positions ‘South Africa as a politically generative place in a global diasporic context’ (p. 8). This is an important intervention: transnational influences in South Africa’s ‘segregationist’ period (1910–48) have long attracted scholarly attention, but South Africans have most often been depicted on the receiving end – translating ideas, especially from African Americans. South Africans emerge in Masango Chéry’s account as more cosmopolitan influencers, at a critical juncture in African and African American religious history and politics. Bringing together church and state collections illuminating the lives of far-flung Black Christians, Masango Chéry assembles a capacious ‘cross-continental archive of Black political organizing’ (p. 9).

Blackness was complicated in the era on which this study focuses. Chapter 1 explores why many influential church leaders were classified as ‘Coloured’ rather than ‘Native’ in South Africa. Masango Chéry usefully highlights how ‘Colouredness’ – usually glossed as ‘mixed race’ – reflected and enabled the mobility undergirding the leadership of African-initiated churches. Informed by this sensitivity to the complexities of Black identities, Chapter 2 offers a fresh appraisal of the religious revolution known as Ethiopianism, launched in 1892 when Maake Mangena Mokone formed the independent Ethiopian Church, inspiring a century of Christian activists (not incidentally, he was the namesake of Masango Chéry’s father). Masango Chéry points out that churches such as the Garveyite African Orthodox Church (AOC) in South Africa, formed in 1924, hinged on the leadership of multi-ethnic, mobile bridge builders. Chapter 3 develops this theme of mobility and Black community building across difference, with a rich biographical study of Charlotte Manye Maxeke and Katie Manye Makanya (nieces of Mangena Mokone). These women of Christian Fingo and Pedi heritage connected South Africans not only to African American Christians but also to each other, in a diverse and rapidly changing region.

Chapter 4 explores multi-ethnic Black Christian bridge building further afield, exploring the AOC’s formation as the key religious affiliate of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association in the USA and the Caribbean, under the leadership of Antigua-born George McGuire. Chapters 5 and 6 then persuasively assert that the AOC flourished in South Africa because it extended core ideas of Black sovereignty and community from the Ethiopian Church. Masango Chéry offers a vivid analysis of McGuire’s relationship with AOC Archbishop Daniel William Alexander. Alexander – classified ‘Coloured’ – epitomizes the cosmopolitan South Africanism at the core of this study: born in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, to a father from Martinique, he led the African hub of the AOC, whose membership extended across British colonial Africa. Branches formed in Zimbabwe and Uganda in 1928; quite consequentially in Kenya in 1935; and then in Ghana and Nigeria in 1944. Chapter 7 explores how Alexander’s strong focus on education enabled the AOC to influence African Christians spiritually and politically – significantly including leaders of the Kikuyu Independent Schools Association and Kikuyu Karing’a Educational Association, therefore influencing the Kenya Land and Freedom Army. South African Christians thus shaped powerful strands of anti-colonial nationalism across the continent.

In sum, this is a wide-ranging study, moving boldly across space and time to tell an inspiring story of how ‘faith forms and informs freedom’ (p. 185). In a subsequent edition, it could be improved by copyediting to correct some misspellings and to avoid repetition. This work will doubtless inform future scholarship on spirituality and politics that centres the lives and dreams of South Africans in the first half of the twentieth century, who offer enduring lessons about maintaining hope and connection in seemingly impossible times.