This verse suggested a future in which Africans could self-govern, and allowed a sense of shared culture and history to develop among black Christians in the Americas.
[1] The term was later given a much wider interpretation by Bengt Sundkler, referring to all African-led churches which had broken away from European Protestant groups.
His book, Bantu Prophets in South Africa, was the first comprehensive study of these African Initiated Churches (AICs).
[2] In 1892, former first head of African ministers in Pretoria, Mangena Maake Mokone, decided to form a new branch and formed the Ethiopian Church, in South Africa, mainly because of dissatisfaction with racial segregation in the church and the lack of fellowship between black and white ministers.
They ended up signing the negotiation and successfully merged the two churches, this allowed South Africans of the parish to go to America to study.
The Order of Ethiopia soon became composed predominantly of Xhosan people, and had little variety of followers unlike the Ethiopian Church from which they separated.
[4] Charlotte Maneye married the Revd Marshall Maxeke, and they did missionary work for the AME Church in South Africa, and in 1908 they founded the Wilberforce Institute in the Transvaal, modelled on her American alma mater.