Diocese of Kimberley and Kuruman

The Anglican presence on the Diamond Fields and in Kimberley's hinterland, from the early 1870s, was at first administered from Bloemfontein, initially under Allan Webb, the oldest parish here being St Mary's, Barkly West.

By the early 1890s, however, there was a feeling in some quarters that the Diocese of Bloemfontein was too big and there were proposals for the formation of a separate bishopric with its seat in Kimberley.

However it was not before July 1911 that all was ready and a formal resolution could be proposed, as it was at a meeting in the Kimberley Town Hall, that ‘the western portion of the Diocese of Bloemfontein be constituted a new and separate Diocese with Kimberley as its Cathedral Town’[2] – to which the Episcopal Synod, meeting in Maritzburg, gave its final consent in the form of a mandate dated 11 October 1911.

The elective assembly for the choosing of a bishop for the new diocese was held in Kimberley on 13 December 1911, at which Wilfrid Gore Browne, Dean of Pretoria, was the unanimous choice.

The southern half of Bechuanaland Protectorate was added om 1915 and remained part of "K&K" (as Kimberley and Kuruman is often called) until Botswana's independence in 1966.

A large contingent flew with Bishop Croft to Kimberley for a Link Summit in 2017,[11] and a meeting on environmental issues followed in Oxford a year later.