Protestant Paths

Protestants have disagreed with each other for centuries. The right to dissent was at the heart of the many and varied paths that developed within English- speaking Protestantism. This history is a closely-researched story about people, interwoven with the beliefs, challenges and changing relationships within three major strands of Protestant dissent, Quakers, Baptists and Methodists, and their varying relations with the established Church of England. When poverty grew in England, dissenting religion grew also. Often, families whose forebears had held land became landless and poor because of large-scale land enclosure. Mass emigration to the colonies by England's "surplus population" was urged. The story moves to the Eastern Cape of South Africa, to which three sons of a Methodist preacher emigrated in the 1870s. Protestant dissent was already strongly established here - running schools and colleges for Africans and ordaining African ministers. They continued doing so during the 46-year apartheid nightmare. It was from this dissenting heartland that South Africa's first black President, and probably the modem world's most famous Methodist, Nelson Mandela, came.