Political education in a food pantry: child perspectives on the liturgy and agape of Rev. Mangedwa Nyathi in Detroit (USA)

ABSTRACT

As a South African exile and anti-apartheid activist in Detroit, Michigan (USA), Rev. Mangedwa Nyathi founded the Hartford Memorial Baptist Church Agape Center, feeding people all over the city during the worst and hardest parts of the 1980s. The theological underpinnings of the food pantry operated as a practical political education in Black liberation. Rev. Nyathi played a profound influence on the author as a child bringing anti-apartheid politics as agape into the life of other clergy members, the author’s parents, and the entire congregation. The Agape Center shaped the author’s anticolonial consciousness by reframing economic justice activism in Detroit within a global context of resistance. This article remembers the work of the Agape Center food pantry, its origins in the political economy and social history of the Hartford Memorial Baptist Church – based on child perspective reminiscences and autobiography. It argues that the anti-apartheid movement in Detroit was peopled by everyday people, children and adults, who were survivors of brutalising levels of racialised economic violence and its attendant colonial ideologies.

KEYWORDS:

• Children
• political education
• apartheid colonialism
• anti-poverty activism
• food pantries
• Black liberation liturgy

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Martin Boston, Abebe Zegeye, and Karima Jeffrey-Legette, Bakari Roscoe, Gladys Mitchell-Walthour, Matthew Booker, Blair Kelley, Patricia Matthew, Jontyle Robinson, Chin Jou, Tom Lekan, and the entire cohort of the 2022-2023 National Humanities Center (USA) class. Your encouragement and joie de vivre are soul nourishment.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Agape as explained by Angela Dillard is ‘the power of language and the meaning of a passionate devotion to a living and politically engaged faith’ (Dillard 2007, viii).

2. This means that Rev. Nyathi was a guide, confessor, prayer partner, and leader for the senior pastor.

3. See Detroit’s 1967 Great Rebellion, the militant Dodge Revolutionary Union movement, the Inner City Voice, the pro-working class Wayne State University students who published The South End, and the Black attorneys who won high profile cases.

4. McGraw’s history notes that a 1931 Detroit News interview with Adolph Hitler in Munich was held in a room adorned with a grand portrait of Henry Ford. Hitler explained to the reporter that Ford ‘was his inspiration’.

5. To make this plain, the level of economic violence of this period made completing high school far too rare for Black people in my age cohort.

6. Dillard describes prominent campaigns in 1927 and in 1920–21.

7. My stepfather’s most serious reprimand, for he was an incredibly loving and nurturing father, was that I must never allow myself to become a zombie/zambi with my will controlled by others. For years, I thought that my stepfather was insulting me by calling me a sleepwalker. I realise now that he was speaking to the overly obedient spirit that has abided with and inside me, helping me create a well-protected interior life and a mostly silent affect and persona. Being accompanied by such a spirit has prepared me for guerilla war (Pontecorvo, 1966), endurance, and for trusting my inner voice – because I have never been governed by whim or fashion.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship hosted by the National Humanities Center.

Notes on contributors

Tiffany Willoughby-Herard

Tiffany Willoughby-Herard is an American academic and author who is an associate professor in the Department of African American Studies at the University of California, Irvine and Professor Extraordinarius in the Chief Albert Luthuli Research Chair at the University of South Africa. Willoughby-Herard’s research focuses on Black political thought, Black radical movements, Black feminist politics, feminist pedagogy, South African politics, youth politics, political education, and queer and trans sexualities.