Written by
The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica
Ethiopianism, religious movement among sub-Saharan Africans
that embodied the earliest stirrings toward religious and political
freedom in the modern colonial period. The movement was initiated in the
1880s when South African mission workers began forming independent
all-African churches, such as the Tembu tribal church (1884) and the
Church of Africa (1889). An ex-Wesleyan minister,Mangena
Mokone, was the first to use the term when he founded the Ethiopian
Church (1892). Among the main causes of the movement were the
frustrations felt by Africans who were denied advancement in the
hierarchy of the mission churches and racial discontent encouraged by
the colour bar. Other contributing factors were the desire for a more
African and relevant Christianity, for the restoration of tribal life,
and for political and cultural autonomy expressed in the slogan “Africa
for the Africans” and also in the word Ethiopianism.
The mystique of the term Ethiopianism derived from its occurrence in the Bible (where Ethiopia
is also referred to as Kush, or Cush) and was enhanced when the ancient
independent Christian kingdom of Ethiopia defeated the Italians at Adwa
in 1896. The word therefore represented Africa’s dignity and place in
the divine dispensation and provided a charter for free African churches
and nations of the future.
Parallel developments occurred elsewhere and for similar reasons. In
Nigeria the so-called African churches—the Native Baptist Church
(1888), the formerly Anglican United Native African Church (1891) and
its later divisions, and the United African Methodist Church (1917)—were
important. Other Ethiopian-related movements were represented by the
Cameroun Native Baptist Church (1887); by the Native Baptist Church
(1898) in Ghana; in Rhodesia by a branch (1906) of the American Negro
denomination, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and by Nemapare’s African Methodist Church (1947); and by the Kenyan Church of Christ in Africa (1957), formerly Anglican.
Early Ethiopianism included tribalist, nationalist, and Pan-African
dimensions, which were encouraged by association with independent
American black churches and radical leaders with “back to Africa” ideas
and an Ethiopianist ideology. This ideology was explicit in the thought
of such pioneers of African cultural, religious, and political
independence as Edward Wilmot Blyden and Joseph Ephraim Casely-Hayford
of Ghana (e.g., his Ethiopia Unbound, 1911).
Ethiopian movements played some part in the Zulu rebellion of 1906
and especially in the Nyasaland rising of 1915 led by John Chilembwe,
founder of the independent Providence Industrial Mission. From about
1920, political activities were channeled into secular political parties
and trade unions, and the use of the term Ethiopian then narrowed to
one section of African independent religious movements (see Zionist church).
These Ethiopian-type churches originated by secession (and further
sub-secessions) from a mission-connected church, which they resemble in
beliefs, polity, and worship and from which they differ in certain
cultural and ethnic practices.
Source: http://www.britannica.com