Protestant Replications: The Conversion, Ordination, and Schism of a Zulu Bishop in Colonial Natal

Abstract

This article examines the story of Mbiyana Ngidi and his five-decade conversion career, leading up to his establishment of an Ethiopianist church in 1890 – the first African Initiated Church in the Colony of Natal in Southern Africa. I focus on three events in his life – conversion, ordination, schism – and suggest that one way of reading these events is as different forms of replication: conversion as identification, ordination as imitation, and schism as reproduction. I engage with the idea in the anthropology of Christianity that Protestants desire a certain type of originality and therefore shun repetition. I argue the opposite, namely that Ngidi’s story shows us how Protestants seek out replicated relations.