Anglican Church of Southern Africa - History

History

The first Anglican clergy to minister regularly at the Cape were military chaplains who accompanied the troops when the British occupied the Cape Colony in 1795 and then again in 1806. The second British occupation resulted in a growing influx of civil servants and settlers who were members of the Church of England, and so civil or colonial chaplains were appointed to minister to their needs. These were under the authority of the governor.

The first missionary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel arrived in 1821. He was the Revd William Wright. He opened a church and school in Wynberg, a fashionable suburb of Cape Town. Allen Gardiner, a missionary of the Church Missionary Society went to Zululand, and arranged for a priest, Francis Owen to be sent to the royal residence of King Dingane. Owen witnessed the massacre of Piet Retief, the Voortrekker leader, and his companions, who had come to negotiate a land treaty with Dingane, and left soon afterwards.

The Anglican Church in Southern Africa at this time was under the Bishop of Calcutta, whose diocese effectively included the East Indies and the entire Southern Hemisphere. Bishops en route for Calcutta sometimes stopped at the Cape for confirmations, and occasionally ordination of clergy, but these visits were sporadic. It became apparent that a bishop was needed for South Africa, and in 1847 Robert Gray was consecrated as the first Bishop of Cape Town in Westminster Abbey. The new bishop landed in Cape Town in 1848.

Some Church of England parishes in the then Cape Colony refused to join the Church of the Province of South Africa when it was constituted in 1870. These parishes expanded throughout South Africa calling themselves the Church of England in South Africa.

Desmond Tutu rose to worldwide fame during the 1980s as an opponent of apartheid. Tutu was elected and ordained the first black South African Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, South Africa, and primate of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, the Albert Schweitzer Prize for Humanitarianism, and the Magubela prize for liberty in 1986.

In 2006, the name Church of the Province of Southern Africa was dropped to avoid historic confusion as to its ambiguous name. The church was renamed the Anglican Church of Southern Africa.

In July 2012, Revd Ellinah Wamukoya of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa became the bishop-elect of Swaziland and the first woman to be elected a bishop in any of the twelve Anglican Provinces in Africa. Her episcopal consecration has been announced for 17 November 2012 at All Saints Cathedral, Mbabane. In October 2012, Revd Canon Margaret Vertue was elected the diocesan bishop of False Bay; she is thus expected to become the second female African Anglican bishop, and the first in South Africa.