Mormon Studies Review
Keywords
Jesse Haven, South Africa, priesthood ban, Brigham Young, racial ideology
Abstract
When Jesse Haven and his two missionary companions, all white elders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, landed on the African continent in 1853 to preach the gospel in the country of South Africa, they had no intention of preaching to the nation’s black inhabitants. Just the year before, Brigham Young, president of the LDS Church, declared to the Utah legislature that “a man who has the African blood in him cannot hold one jot nor tittle of Priesthood.”1 T hese comments fit the governing ideology of South Africa, where the black majority was treated as second-class citizens. As in many places throughout the Anglo world, Africans were labeled kaffirs, or unbelievers, by their white counterparts.2 The idea that black skin indicated inheritance of divine curses placed on Cain and Ham dominated the entire Anglophone world and this belief “was entrenched in Mormon dogma.”3
BYU ScholarsArchive Citation
Mdletshe, Khumbulani D.
(2020)
"The Latter-day Saints and Race Issues in South Africa,"
Mormon Studies Review: Vol. 7:
No.
1, Article 7.
Available at:
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/msr2/vol7/iss1/7