Adventism has a long history in Africa, but much of it survives only in mission reports written from outside or in the memories of older members. This stream is for telling that story from the inside: the people, places and turning points of Adventism on the continent.
Where the story starts
In 1879, barely fifteen years after the Adventist movement was founded in the United States, Dr. H. P. Ribton, a recent convert, briefly opened an Adventist school in Egypt. The first lasting presence came in South Africa in 1887. In 1894 Solusi Mission was founded in what is now Zimbabwe; it later grew into Solusi University.
From those beginnings the church spread through schools, clinics and the work of African evangelists, teachers and nurses whose names rarely appear in official histories. Today Africa is home to a large and growing share of the world church’s members.
What historians have said
Adrian Hastings, in The Church in Africa, 1450–1950 (1994), and Elizabeth Isichei, in A History of Christianity in Africa (1995), showed that African Christianity was never simply a missionary export. Africans received, reshaped and spread the faith themselves, often well ahead of foreign missionaries.
Andrew Walls, the Scottish historian of mission, argued in The Missionary Movement in Christian History (1996) that Christianity’s centre of gravity has moved south, and that what happens in Africa now shapes the future of the whole church.
Ogbu Kalu, the Nigerian church historian, edited African Christianity: An African Story (2005) to make a simple point: Africans must write their own church history, from their own sources, including oral memory.
What we hope to publish
Histories of congregations, schools, hospitals and unions; profiles of pioneers, especially African ones; and oral histories from first-generation church workers before those memories are lost. If you hold letters, photographs or stories, we would like to hear from you. See Write for us.
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