Africans seek to bypass what they consider…

Africans seek to bypass what they consider the discriminatory practices of the established Christian churches (which often preach to segregated audiences and seldom promote Africans within their ranks) by founding separate organizations of their own.

Starting in 1884 with Nehemiah Tile, a Thembu (Tembu) Methodist preacher from the eastern Cape who had left the Methodists and established the Tembu National Church, Africans build their own churches throughout South Africa.

Many of these churches are termed "Ethiopian" by their founders, on the basis of the biblical prophecy "that Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands to God," and because for centuries an African-run independent Christian church has existed in Ethiopia.

A strong influence on these churches in the 1890s and the early 1900s is the United States-based African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), which sends missionaries to South Africa and trains many blacks from South Africa at its own institutions in the United States.

Members of these independent churches call not so much for the elimination of racial discrimination and inequality as for an "Africa for the Africans," that is, a country ruled by blacks.