Kingdom Come: The Politics of Faith and Freedom in Segregationist South Africa and Beyond, is both a personal journey and an account of Black diasporic journeys and their intersection with faith and protest in early twentieth-century South Africa. Journeying abounds within its pages, both literal journeys connecting Africans across South Africa, Kenya, the Caribbean, and the United States, and the more metaphysical journeys that allowed them to draw on their Christianity as succor in their African Christian vision of a kingdom of justice. At the same time, it is a sophisticated treatment of the complicated fashioning of Coloured (Chéry’s spelling) subjectivity in early-twentieth-century South Africa. Scholars of religion may gravitate to the former; others to the latter, which resonates with recent work on pan-African cosmopolitanism.

In Chapter One, Chéry presents an important theoretical consideration of the historical constitution of race in South Africa. The colonial and, subsequently, South African state deployed understandings of race that relegated “mixed-race” South Africans to the category of Coloured (8). South African scholars will understand precisely how the racial category is employed (not the same as in the United States), but its use in the early twentieth century “functioned as a racial alternative for those who could not be defined as white or Black” (14). African Americans and other Black folk had a paradoxical status in the diaspora as Coloured (not African according to South African state ideology, but not white either), in ways which emphasize the constructed nature of categories. This is a welcome antidote to some of the current historiography on Colouredness, including the scholarship that views Colouredness as rooted in a minority cultural nationalism.

If the Introduction and Chapter One frame the book, its arc is realized through chapters that play on the themes of ethnic identity and faith, and self-liberation, in roughly chronological fashion (though the bulk of the book covers the 1930s). Chéry examines the nature of Ethiopianism carefully, showing its early Creolized identity in Christian movements among travelers, sailors, and former members of mission stations in the Western Cape. This moves the origins of Ethiopianism, a spiritual movement, to earlier than standard accounts of African-initiated Christianity allow. Coloureds, Africans, and members of the diaspora were united in the constitution of this spirituality.

In the second half of the book, Chéry focuses more closely on the African Orthodox Church (AOC), a breakaway Anglican (Episcopalian) movement, with an ethnically hybrid leadership. The AOC was an Ethiopianist church with branches in Ghana, Uganda, and Kenya, as well as connections into the Black Diaspora. It presaged Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). As Chéry notes, UNIA, despite its presence in the United States, had relatively little traction in South Africa. The AOC was much more successful at pulling Coloured and other lay folk into a broader vision of a united and pan-African space for Christian worship. Chéry is careful in noting how this church and similar movements challenged those who came to it to think in terms of a pan-African Christian spirituality.

I particularly liked that several of the chapters used life history vignettes to illuminate their themes, like the account of Samuel Jacobus Brander, whose paternal and maternal connections made him simultaneously Sotho, Cape Coloured, and a descendant of an African American mother (46). In Chapter Three, Chéry turns to Charlotte and Katie Manye (more frequently known by their married names of Maxeke and Makanya), in a careful stitching together of small fragments of archival material to show their authority as women of the church. The archival work behind this volume is precise and loving. In Chapter Four we see Black ministers at work in the United States and in Chapter Seven, Archbishop Daniel Alexander takes the AOC into a ministry in Kenya.

I also appreciated the way that journeys are present in Chéry’s diaspora scholarship, decentering the Atlantic in diaspora narratives and reiterating the importance of intra-continental diasporas. In terms of pan-African scholarship, this kind of envisioning is critical. It both helps to relocate a series of forgotten (in the scholarship of the global North) histories in relation to each other but also is an affirmation of the relevance of this kind of work for other decolonial scholars of African history.

One of the strengths of the volume is the way in which Chéry moves between her own history and the history of transnational racial solidarity through Christianity. The book is tender in its personal recollection.

If I have a quibble with the book, it lies in the introduction. It is a rather short discussion of key themes, other authors, and an account of the chapter outlines. Often, Chéry lists a set of authors who have written in her field, in one instance ten names in a row, with a comment that these authors have provided insight into, for example, Garveyism. The first chapter stands more firmly as a solid introduction to the book, and historiographical contributions are spelt out in later chapters, but a stronger introduction would have served the book better.