Twelfth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

Women’s church prayer and service organizations (commonly known as manyanos) are the largest formal women’s organizations in South Africa, and since the early twentieth century have been a vital part of congregational life in most black churches.However, the records of these grassroots groups have largely been left out of official denominational archives, which has contributed to their underrepresentation in histories of southern African Christianity. One exception to this archival silence is the Methodist manyano branch at Queenstown in the Eastern Cape region, whose meeting minutes and financial reports have been preserved from the early twentieth century until the 1980s. This paper analyses this unique, untapped textual source of African women’s spiritual practice and religious organization, focusing on the period 1920-1950 when labour migration, racial segregation, and apartheid disrupted the livelihoods of women in this region. Analysis of the meeting minutes reveals the intense spiritual solidarity of women who “wept”, “wailed,” and “trembled under the Word” together. These texts also reveal how manyano women interpreted Christian scripture in ways that emphasized their chosenness by God and their spiritual authority. This paper concludes that these meeting minutes are more than institutional records, but instead deserve to take a place within the history of African Christian theology.