Ethiopianism, religious movement among sub-Saharan Africans that embodied the earliest stirrings toward religious and political freedom in the modern colonial period. The movement was initiated in the 1880s when South African mission workers began forming independent all-African churches, such as the Tembu tribal church (1884) and the Church of Africa (1889). An ex-Wesleyan minister, Mangena Mokone, was the first to use the term when he founded the Ethiopian Church (1892). Among the main causes of the movement were the frustrations felt by Africans who were denied advancement in the hierarchy of the mission churches and racial discontent encouraged by the colour bar. Other contributing factors were the desire for a more African and relevant Christianity, for the restoration of tribal life, and for political and cultural autonomy expressed in the slogan “Africa for the Africans” and also in the word Ethiopianism.
The mystique of the term Ethiopianism derived from its occurrence in the Bible (where Ethiopia is also referred to as Kush, or Cush), especially Psalm 68:31, which states, “let Ethiopia hasten to stretch out its hands to God.” Ethiopia was commonly viewed as an idealized “African Zion,” especially given its ancient Christianity and uninterrupted independence from European colonization. Use of the term was enhanced when the kingdom of Ethiopia defeated the Italians at the Battle of Adwa in 1896. The word therefore represented Africa’s dignity and place in the divine dispensation and provided a charter for free African churches and nations of the future.
Parallel developments occurred elsewhere and for similar reasons. In Nigeria the so-called African churches—the Native Baptist Church (1888), the formerly Anglican United Native African Church (1891) and its later divisions, and the United African Methodist Church (1917)—were important. Other Ethiopian-related movements were represented by the Native Baptist Church (1887) of Cameroon; by the Native Baptist Church (1898) in Ghana; in Rhodesia by a branch (1906) of the American Negro denomination, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and by Nemapare’s African Methodist Church (1947); and by the Kenyan Church of Christ in Africa (1957), formerly Anglican.
In the United States the “Africa for the Africans” movement was particularly exemplified in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, founded in 1816 in Philadelphia by Richard Allen. The movement helped contribute to the formation of an African American cultural identity through a distinctive African spirituality and autonomy from dominant white churches. Indeed, early Ethiopianism, which included tribalist, nationalist, and Pan-African dimensions, was encouraged by association with independent American black churches and radical leaders with “back to Africa” ideas and an Ethiopianist ideology. This ideology was explicit in the thought of such pioneers of African cultural, religious, and political independence as Edward Wilmot Blyden and Joseph Ephraim Casely-Hayford of Ghana (e.g., his Ethiopia Unbound, 1911).
Ethiopian movements played some part in the Zulu rebellion of 1906 and especially in the Nyasaland rising of 1915 led by John Chilembwe, founder of the independent Providence Industrial Mission. From about 1920, political activities were channeled into secular political parties and trade unions, and the use of the term Ethiopian then narrowed to one section of African independent religious movements (see Zionist church). These Ethiopian-type churches originated by secession (and further sub-secessions) from a mission-connected church, which they resemble in beliefs, polity, and worship and from which they differ in certain cultural and ethnic practices.
By the early 1970s the term Ethiopianism was not in popular use outside southern Africa. When employed for this form of religious movement elsewhere in Africa, it is used by many but not all scholars as a historical or classificatory term.