Zion in Africa

Zion in Africa
Author: Hugh MacMillan
Publisher: I.B. Tauris
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2017-03-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781784536664

The Jewish community played a pivotal role in the history and economic development of Zambia - and Central Africa more broadly - in the course of the twentieth century. This book tells the story of the coming of the first Jews to the area in the late nineteenth century, the heyday of the Jewish community in the mid-twentieth century, and its decline since Zambian independence. Dealing primarily with the Jewish traders in Zambia who flourished in the face of both anti-Semitism and their own acute social dislocation, Hugh Macmillan and Frank Shapiro explore a number of interrelated topics: the colonial office discussions about Jewish immigration in the 1930s, the arrival and settlement of refugees who escaped the Holocaust, Jewish religious life in the region, and the remarkable cultural, professional and political role played by members of the Jewish community. Setting these issues in the context of a general history of southern and central Africa, this book constitutes a major contribution to our understanding of the economic history of the entire region. This new edition includes an epilogue which brings the story up to the present day.

Searching for Zion

Searching for Zion
Author: Emily Raboteau
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2013-01-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 080219379X

From Jerusalem to Ghana to Katrina-ravaged New Orleans, a woman reclaims her history in a “beautifully written and thought-provoking” memoir (Dave Eggers, author of A Hologram for the King and Zeitoun). A biracial woman from a country still divided along racial lines, Emily Raboteau never felt at home in America. As the daughter of an African American religious historian, she understood the Promised Land as the spiritual realm black people yearned for. But while visiting Israel, the Jewish Zion, she was surprised to discover black Jews. More surprising was the story of how they got there. Inspired by their exodus, her question for them is the same one she keeps asking herself: have you found the home you’re looking for? In this American Book Award–winning inquiry into contemporary and historical ethnic displacement, Raboteau embarked on a ten-year journey around the globe and back in time to explore the complex and contradictory perspectives of black Zionists. She talked to Rastafarians and African Hebrew Israelites, Evangelicals and Ethiopian Jews—all in search of territory that is hard to define and harder to inhabit. Uniting memoir with cultural investigation, Raboteau overturns our ideas of place, patriotism, dispossession, citizenship, and country in “an exceptionally beautiful . . . book about a search for the kind of home for which there is no straight route, the kind of home in which the journey itself is as revelatory as the destination” (Edwidge Danticat, author of The Farming of Bones).

African Pilgrimage

African Pilgrimage
Author: Retief Müller
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2011
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1409430839

This book describes a South Africa that is made up of a number of different fragmented worlds. The focus is on the Zion Christian Church, one of the largest religious movements in southern Africa, and a good example of indigenized African Christianity. This book tells the story of how the enduring ritual of pilgrimage is transforming African religion, along with the lives of ordinary South Africans.

Songs of Zion

Songs of Zion
Author: James T. Campbell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 445
Release: 1995-09-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0195360052

This is a study of the transplantation of a creed devised by and for African Americans--the African Methodist Episcopal Church--that was appropriated and transformed in a variety of South African contexts. Focusing on a transatlantic institution like the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the book studies the complex human and intellectual traffic that has bound African American and South African experience. It explores the development and growth of the African Methodist Episcopal Church both in South Africa and America, and the interaction between the two churches. This is a highly innovative work of comparative and religious history. Its linking of the United States and African black religious experiences is unique and makes it appealing to readers interested in religious history and black experience in both the United States and South Africa.

African Zion

African Zion
Author: Robert G. Weisbord
Publisher:
Total Pages: 368
Release: 1968
Genre: History
ISBN:

Come Shouting to Zion

Come Shouting to Zion
Author: Sylvia R. Frey
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2000-11-09
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0807861588

The conversion of African-born slaves and their descendants to Protestant Christianity marked one of the most important social and intellectual transformations in American history. Come Shouting to Zion is the first comprehensive exploration of the processes by which this remarkable transition occurred. Using an extraordinary array of archival sources, Sylvia Frey and Betty Wood chart the course of religious conversion from the transference of traditional African religions to the New World through the growth of Protestant Christianity in the American South and British Caribbean up to 1830. Come Shouting to Zion depicts religious transformation as a complex reciprocal movement involving black and white Christians. It highlights the role of African American preachers in the conversion process and demonstrates the extent to which African American women were responsible for developing distinctive ritual patterns of worship and divergent moral values within the black spiritual community. Finally, the book sheds light on the ways in which, by serving as a channel for the assimilation of Western culture into the slave quarters, Protestant Christianity helped transform Africans into African Americans.

Brothers and Strangers

Brothers and Strangers
Author: I. K. Sundiata
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 460
Release: 2003
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780822332473

DIVAn account of the rise, fall, and persistence of the 20th century's Black Zionist dream -- the movement's creation of a homeland in Africa./div

Old Ship of Zion

Old Ship of Zion
Author: the late Walter F. Pitts
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 216
Release: 1996-10-24
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 019535480X

This book retraces the African origins of African-American forms of worship. During a five-year period in the field, Pitts played the piano at and recorded numerous worship services in black Baptist churches throughout rural Texas. His historical comparisons and linguistic analyses of this material uncover striking parallels between "Afro-Baptist" services and the religious rituals of Western and Central Africa, as well as other African-derived rituals in the United States Sea Islands, the Caribbean, and Brazil. Pitts demonstrates that African and African-American worship share an underlying binary ritual frame: the somber melancholy of the first frame and the high emotion of the second frame. Pitts's revealing perspective on this often misunderstood aspect of African-American religion provides an investigative model for the study of diaspora cultural practices and the residual influence of their African sources.

The Colors of Zion

The Colors of Zion
Author: George Bornstein
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2011-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674057015

A major reevaluation of relationships among Blacks, Jews, and Irish in the years between the Irish Famine and the end of World War II, The Colors of Zion argues that the cooperative efforts and sympathies among these three groups, each persecuted and subjugated in its own way, was much greater than often acknowledged today. For the Black, Jewish, and Irish writers, poets, musicians, and politicians at the center of this transatlantic study, a sense of shared wrongs inspired repeated outpourings of sympathy. If what they have to say now surprises us, it is because our current constructions of interracial and ethnic relations have overemphasized conflict and division. As George Bornstein says in his Introduction, he chooses “to let the principals speak for themselves.” While acknowledging past conflicts and tensions, Bornstein insists on recovering the “lost connections” through which these groups frequently defined their plights as well as their aspirations. In doing so, he examines a wide range of materials, including immigration laws, lynching, hostile race theorists, Nazis and Klansmen, discriminatory university practices, and Jewish publishing houses alongside popular plays like The Melting Pot and Abie’s Irish Rose, canonical novels like Ulysses and Daniel Deronda, music from slave spirituals to jazz, poetry, and early films such as The Jazz Singer. The models of brotherhood that extended beyond ethnocentrism a century ago, the author argues, might do so once again today, if only we bear them in mind. He also urges us to move beyond arbitrary and invidious categories of race and ethnicity.

African Zion

African Zion
Author: Edith Bruder
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2012
Genre: Black Hebrews
ISBN: 9781443838023

Over the last hundred years, in Africa and the United States, through a variety of religious encounters, some black African societies adopted â " or perhaps rediscovered â " a Judaic religious identity. African Zion grows out of a joined interest in these diversified encounters with Judaism, their common substrata and divergences, their exogenous or endogenous characteristics, the entry or re-entry of these people into the contemporary world as Jews and the necessity of reshaping the standard accounts of their collective experience. In various loci the bonds with Judaism of black Jews were often forged in the harshest circumstances and grew out of experiences of slavery, exile, colonial subjugation, political ethnic conflicts and apartheid. For the African peoples who identify as Jews and with other Jews, identification with biblical Israel assumes symbolical significance. This book presents the way in which the religious identification of African American Jews and African black Jews â " â oerealâ , ideal or imaginary â " has been represented, conceptualized and reconfigured over the last century or so. These essays grow out of a concern to understand Black encounters with Judaism, Jews and putative Hebrew/Israelite origins and are intended to illuminate their developments in the medley of race, ethnicity, and religion of the African and African American religious experience. They reflect the geographical and historic mosaic of black Judaism, permeated as it is with different â oemeaningsâ , both contemporary and historical.