South Africa and Beyond: Seth Mokitimi and the ‘Kingdom without Barriers’, 1939–1964

Born in Basutoland in 1904, Seth Mokitimi crossed linguistic and regional barriers in his education, teaching career and ordained ministry in South Africa. As the long-serving housemaster and then chaplain at Healdtown, premier Methodist mission institution in the Eastern Cape, he was also drawn in the 1940s into advocating the crossing of the racial divide. He spoke out against segregation and then apartheid, asserting the undivided, multiracial nature of both church and society in South Africa. He also traversed the limits of both national and denominational Christianity in four ecumenical overseas trips between 1939 and 1961. In 1964 he was the first black minister to preside over the South African Methodist Conference, a pioneering development which too often remains the only basis on which Mokitimi is now remembered. This article uses the notion of boundary-crossing to interrogate the broader historical significance of his life, particularly exploring his transnational church experiences and appraising his precise political location, both still under-examined aspects of his ‘religious biography’. For Mokitimi has not really been perceived as crossing the boundary into what might be termed ‘political priesthood’ or ‘militant ministry’, yet he was an important black spokesman for liberal, multiracial, ecumenical Christianity from the 1930s to the 1960s – and is still sufficiently revered in our own time to provide the name for a new Methodist theological college recently set up in South Africa.